Dust of the Arena
by Mad Minute
Summary: A Central American civil war, complete with giant bugs, weird magic, and women who can kill him in a heartbeat yes, Xander's about to go on 'holiday'. [Crossover with the strategy RPG 'Jagged Alliance 2'. Work in Progress.]
1. Back in the mud again

**DISCLAIMER:** All characters and concepts from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' are the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy; all characters, creatures, locations and concepts from 'Jagged Alliance 2' belong to Strategy First and/or TalonSoft and/or SirTech; I'm just borrowing their toys for a while, with no intent to profit from that use.

However, all original characters, creatures, and situations are entirely mine and may not be used without permission or acknowledgement. All canon-fanatics should be aware that I have done a great deal of 'fleshing out' with regards to the JA2 story and characters, including giving Arulco a context (both in terms of geopolitics and my own take on the Buffyverse) instead of leaving it in its original little vacuum. :-P

**WARNING:** Rated R (as a minimum) - contains wartime violence, coarse language, and possibly sexual situations, depending on whether I actually write the details of that side of things and find the nerve to post the result, or simply hint at things and leave the rest to your no-doubt fertile imaginations. :-P

(In deference to the mores and Mods of , while there may be some strong innuendo (waves to Fox!), any material that approaches actual intimate activity will be included only in the version posted at the XanderZone. :-P)

**DISTRIBUTION:** XanderZone, , BearPit Forums - others only by request.

**SYMBOLOGY KEY: **((radio traffic)), ::translated::

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**DUST OF THE ARENA - Prelude**

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****17:23, FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5, 1999, LIMA (00:23/06-02-99 ZULU)**

**ELEVEN KILOMETRES SOUTH-SOUTH-EAST OF REBEL-HELD DRASSEN**

**KINGDOM OF ARULCO**

Earth fountained skywards in an ear-shattering blast.

Lieutenant Ernesto Calderon cringed as dirt and stones and leaf-litter rained down on him and his radioman, sparing the barest hint of a thought to be thankful that they'd found even so meagre a piece of cover as this shallow hollow they were now sprawled in; his only machine-gun team had been less fortunate, taking the full force of that rocket from less than a metre away, and what was left of them wasn't recognisably human. Every iota of his conscious mind and attention, though, was bent on the radio he was currently shouting into – and the fellow on the other end of the radio link. "::Bravo Five, I say again, I am taking heavy fire, estimate platoon-strength with heavy weapons. These spooks are fucking close, sir! Request immediate gunship support two kilometres north-east of Waypoint SINGER, over!::"

(("::Bravo One-Five, copy your request – wait one, over.::"))

Calderon blinked at the handset for a moment, then shot his radioman a bewildered look. "::Jesus, Julio, d'you believe this shit? The fucker put me on hold!::"

"::Just as long as he's not playing 'Singing in the Rain' over the net,::" the corporal quipped shakily, firing a couple of bursts towards the nearest rebel muzzle-flash. He snarled a curse and cringed deeper into the hollow as streams of red tracer came back towards him, ripping past overhead with a godawful _cra-cra-crackle_. "::I thought the spooks weren't supposed to have heavy weapons, sir? I already count two MGs – not mention that fucking rocket-launcher!::"

"::What, you expect Intelligence to actually know its ass from a hole in the ground? How long have you been in the army, anyway?::"

Julio Moncada glanced at his commander to offer a sarcastic rejoinder... and a bullet tore off the top half of his face. Gore and other materials splashed everywhere, including in Calderon's face.

Recoiling from the wreckage that had been an almost-friend half a second before, Calderon hastily wiped the man's blood and brains out of his eyes and mouth and raised his head a fraction to see where the hell that had come from. _Shit!_ "::Bravo Five, Bravo Five, they're in our flank, repeat they've got us flanked, **where the fuck are those gunships?**::"

(("::Bravo One-Five, gunship flight, callsign Tiger Zero-Three, ETA your position now seven minutes -"::))

"::**We don't have seven minutes!**::" Calderon screamed into the handset. Motion in the trees to his platoon's right caught his eye, and for the first time he saw the rebels who had flanked his platoon: only four or five of them, clad in camouflage uniforms of an unfamiliar (and thus foreign) pattern, but they were moving with professional speed and precision, their shooting steady and aimed. "::Oh, fuck this!::" he snarled, tossing away the mike; shouldering his HK33 for the first time in the engagement, he fired three quick rounds towards the nearest of the rebel troopers. The man jerked and dropped from sight, his shrieks of pain making it clear that at least one of the lieutenant's shots had found its place.

_Don't like it when it's not all going your way, do you, you spook bastards?_ the lieutenant thought savagely, turning his sights on the next man.

Only it wasn't a **man**.

For a moment that seemed to last an eternity, Calderon's eyes locked with the oncoming rebel trooper's. They were **blue** eyes, eyes that belonged to no native Arulcan – especially not when framed by tanned Caucasian skin and wisps of long blonde hair that had escaped from beneath a US-pattern Kevlar helmet.

_A **woman**?_ Calderon gaped.

The moment ended. The 'rebel' dropped behind a fold in the terrain.

_What the hell? How the hell did a _gringo_ **woman** end up fighting for the Cordonas?_ Calderon wondered wildly.

He never heard the rocket that killed him.

- - - - - - - -

Charlene Higgens, callsign 'Raven', kept the officer's body in her sights as she approached, but it was mere reflex professionalism. Her ambush team's only Carl Gustav team had been set up on the long-arm of the L, the one which had fired first, and Steve Bornell had obviously decided that the radio-aerial made a good target-reference point for his third round. The radioman's body had taken most of the blast and been blown to scattered, gory pieces; tossed into the air like a Cabbage Patch Doll by the explosion, the FRA lieutenant had landed on his back some five metres behind the impact point, and the front of his head and torso were **gone**, as if smashed in by God's own fist. Wincing at the mess – even after her six years in LAPD SWAT's élite D Platoon, that was a sight to turn the stomach – she lowered her carbine and raised a thumb to her back-up man. "Clear!"

"That's all of 'em," 'Wolf' Sanderson agreed from a few metres behind her. "Nothin' left but funerals here."

Raven sagged on her haunches and let out a long breath. Wolf's gallows comment was an exaggeration – a pair of stunned-looking FRA grunts were stumbling into the jungle with their hands interlocked behind their heads while Blood and Dmitri held their rifles on them, and Fox was working fast to patch up a man who'd taken two rounds in the guts – but it was close enough. Her scratch ambush party, barely fifteen strong, had all but annihilated an entire FRA platoon. "How's Malice?"

"Yelping like a kicked dog," the chunky mechanic snorted. "Took one in the arm - didn't hit bone, Fox says he'll be okay."

The blonde woman nodded absently and lifted one hand to her radio headset. "Ice, anybody hurt on your end?"

(("We're all cool, dude.")) Ice Williams was, as always, so laidback that he was almost unconscious - perhaps it was a product of his growing up in Malibu. (("Looks like the Canuck's little booboo's the only ding anybody got."))

"**GUNSHIPS!**" screamed another trooper.

"Shit!" Raven hissed, snatching up her carbine again. "EVERYBODY UNDER COVER, NOW!"

- - - - - - - -

A mile and a half to the south and a thousand feet above the jungle canopy, a pair of Mi-35M _Hind_ gunships in FARA livery came to a hover, sweeping the ambush-site with their electro-optical sights to sort out what was going on. Refitted by the French some three years before, these gunships had far better avionics and sensors than many of their Eastern Bloc cousins, and they carried modern Western anti-tank missiles to boot, but in a situation like this, their old-style rocket pods and YakB 12.7mm gatling guns would be more than ample.

Unfortunately, they couldn't see a damned thing. The rebels had melted back into the jungle as soon as they heard the rotors; even the most modern camera can't see through trees, and in the middle of a February afternoon in a country less than five degrees below the equator, thermal-imaging was out of the question.

- - - - - - - -

Raven clung to the bottom of her spider-hole, watching the government choppers over the sights of her carbine. She'd done some reading up before she came to Arulco, and she was quite happy to steer clear of those things. The Afghan _mudjehadeen_ had dubbed them "the Devil's Chariot", and it was apt: they carried enough firepower to flatten a city block and were all but invulnerable to any weapon her people were carrying. "Stay cool, everybody," she breathed over the radio, trying to ignore the way her heart was hammering in her throat. "Wait for 'em to get bored."

The _Hinds_ just hung there in the air, little more than olive-drab blobs at this distance, their noses waggling back and forth a little as their crews apparently tried to assess the situation on the ground.

_C'mon, c'mon, give up! The guys you came to help are all dead already and you can't see any bad guys – go **HOME**, goddammit!_ Raven thought at them, as loudly as she dared.

The choppers seemed to waver in the air for a moment, and her heart almost stopped for a moment as she thought they might be about to fire... then she saw their noses swing around to the south-west and drop as they left at high speed. Letting out the breath she'd been holding, she let her head sag forward to rest against her weapon while she savoured the relief. After a few moments, she shook it off and rose to her feet. "Okay, people, saddle up! Fox, can we move that casualty?"

The brunette she'd addressed looked up from the wounded FRA conscript she'd once again knelt down beside. "We'll need a stretcher!" she called back. "I'm gonna give him some morphine and start an IV, but we need to get him back to the field-hospital stat or he's not gonna make it!"

"Right!" Raven nodded. "Dmitri, give those prisoners the folding stretcher, they can carry their buddy. Wolf, Stephen, Nails, police up all the hardware and ammo you can carry, the militia needs modern weapons. I want to be back in Drassen before dark, people, so move!"

- - - - - - - -

**22:23, FEBRUARY 5, 1999, LIMA (05:23/06-02-99, ZULU)**

**SUB-LEVEL J, MORRIS MINERALS SILVER MINE**

**DRASSEN, FREE ARULCO**

"::- so I say, 'Actually, I kiss **your** mother with this mouth!'::"

Several of the speaker's companions exchanged old-fashioned looks at hearing that punch-line, but didn't look away from the chunks of ore they were breaking up for easier loading into the skips that would take it to the surface for processing. The foreman wasn't so shy. "::Y'know, Esteban, that joke was funny the first time, and it was okay the second, but after fifteen tellings it's kind'a lost its spark.::"

"::That's just 'cause you've got no sense of humour, Vargas,::" the erstwhile comedian returned sourly. The sparse, bare light-bulbs strung overhead were enough to work by, but they were still fairly weak, and Esteban cast a large, inky shadow on the wall behind him as he turned to face the foreman. "::Y'know, you really ought to -::"

**SHHHRRRRAAAA-OOOOOOOO!!**

"::What the **fuck**?::" Esteban yelped, turning to look towards that unholy screech. It had come from down the end of the tunnel they were currently working, and it had not come from a man or any machine he could think of; it certainly did not belong in a mine. The screams of fear and horror that came after it, however, were all too human.

As unnerved as any of his men, Vargas took his radio from his belt and keyed it. "::Barres, this is Vargas, what's going on down there?::"

There was no reply over the radio, but a moment after the first sound, the men of Barres' work party came stampeding out of the tunnel-mouth, clawing and tripping over each other in their desperation to flee whatever was behind them. Barres himself was near the front of the mob, and he was utterly panicked. "::Start the elevator - we have to get out of here!::"

"::Barres, what the fuck is happening down there?::" Vargas demanded, his own alarm making the question an accusation.

"::Creatures - monsters!::" the other man babbled, the words stumbling over themselves as his men had done. "::They're coming out of the walls!::"

"::'Monsters'?::" Vargas blinked. "::Are you out of your -::"

Then the first of the creatures came out of the tunnel, and Vargas' incredulity died.

Soon after that, so did Vargas and his men.

- - - - - - - -

Almost an hour later, Corporal Len Anderson, US Army Special Forces (ret.), flipped up his night-vision goggles, shifted his M-4 carbine on its sling and knelt down to examine the mess while Stephen Rothman and Igor Dolvich covered the roughly circular nine-foot hole in the tunnel wall a few metres away. Though the chemical break-light he'd tossed to the very edge of that hole rendered everything in shades of fluorescent blue, he could easily distinguish the blood-stains on the rocky floor, which trailed all the way from where the mining crew had obviously been killed, then dragged into this side-tunnel. _To be devoured at leisure, if they're right about this not being anything human._ Over to one side lay an entire human arm, apparently torn off whole; the exposed bone of the ball-joint gleamed in the chem-light's muted glare. Len reached down and plucked up something else, a human skull stripped of all other flesh and tissue as if by caustic chemicals; the entire front-right third of it was gone, the bone sheared by what could only be needle-sharp teeth backed by staggeringly powerful jaws. In almost thirty years of combat experience, he'd seen every gruesome fashion of violent death and maiming imaginable - and a few he'd never have come up with on his own and would rather not have been introduced to - but even by those standards, what he was seeing now was... ghastly. Turning his head a little, he spoke to the guide in Spanish; he'd learned the language from _chicano_ friends in his native Texas, whose dialect was far removed from the Arulcan idiom, but it was far better than appearing condescending by addressing the natives in English might have been. "::Mateo, you say Vargas radioed that he was being attacked by 'monsters'?::"

"::That's all he had time to say,::" the foreman nodded. "::After that, it was all screaming.::"

Len nodded his agreement with that smart move, swearing bitterly to himself. _God**DAMN** it, we don't need this right now!_ "::Sub-levels H and below are off-limits until further notice. Any work-parties that do come into the mine are to be escorted by armed militia at all times, and nobody moves in groups of less than five or goes into areas that aren't covered by the flood-lights.::" Standing up, he cricked his neck and added, "::Now let's get topside, pronto. I need to make a 'phone call.::"

_'Cause when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro... and we need to talk to the pros in this kind'a stuff._

- - - - - - - -

**08:27, SUNDAY FEBRUARY 7, 1999, LIMA (20:27/06-02-99 ZULU)**

**'THE PENTAGON' (NZSAS/NZPDS HEADQUARTERS)**

**HOBSONVILLE, NEW ZEALAND**

(("_shhhwoooing!_ Message for you, sir!"))

Even the Monty Python-ism on his e-mail warning didn't do much to amuse Lieutenant-Colonel James 'Zorro' Torrance. He'd already been here for better than two hours, and the stack of paper on his desk was just as deep as ever. _Well, at least it's something to get me away from these bloody ridiculous bureaucratic hoops they keep expecting me to jump through,_ he noted sardonically, turning to the computer to open the new message.

His eyes widened a little when he saw who it had come from, and the contents didn't do much to assuage that amazement. When he finished reading and digested the implications, the first summary thought to mind was a simple _Bloody hell!_

Zorro took half a moment to consider his choices... then smiled thinly as he picked up the phone. _Just as well I have specialists._ "Switchboard? Put me through to Golf Troop, please."


	2. So much for the holiday

This fic is dedicated to the memory of Tony MacDonald, RAN, dedicated serviceman, fellow W/X writer, and recent cancer victim; the fictionalised likenesses of the MacDonald brothers are used with the permission of Lt. Commander Michael MacDonald, RAN, and will hopefully reflect at least a fraction of the great respect I have for both of them, as writers and as servicemen. RIP, Tony – I don't doubt you earned it.

Remember: Transmitted, ::translated::

- - - - - - - -

**10:41, SUNDAY FEBRUARY 07, 1999, LIMA _(22:41/06-02-99 ZULU)_  
HAZELTON RESIDENCE  
ESK VIEW, NAPIER, NEW ZEALAND**

For once, Napier's mercurial weather patterns had shown mercy over the Waitangi Day weekend, and the hillside property Andrew Hazelton had bought thirty-nine years before was already basking in the horizon-to-horizon sunlight that would become outright brutal heat in a couple of hours. In the kitchen, Andrushka and his half-sister Elena Zyrianova were sorting out the food for the barbecue, chatting back and forth as they cut vegetables and tossed salads. Just outside the open French doors of the conservatory, a game of backyard cricket was underway, with Elena's twin thirteen-year-old grandchildren batting and three young adults in the field.

On strike, Nikolai Zyrianov narrowed his eyes as the bowler approached the stumps, wound up the tennis ball, and delivered... then he timed it perfectly and hammered the ball back past that bowler's ear, sending it over the fence twenty metres behind him and far out into the long grass. "Six runs!" he chortled.

"And out, remember?" the bowler reminded him mildly, and the boy's face fell. "Plus: **you** get to fetch the ball."

"'Fetch'?" was the incredulous splutter. "Just 'cause you're named after a dog doesn't mean I've got to sit up and beg when you say so, Snoopy!"

"Kolya!" his aunt barked, with a hint of a Russian accent, and the boy's petulant scowl melted before her furious glare. "Lose the attitude, right now. You'll never be too big for me to turn over my knee, _panyemayo_?"

"Yeah, I got'cha," Kolya muttered sullenly, then, reluctantly, looked at the man he'd mouthed off to. "I'm sorry – I was out of line."

"No harm, no foul," Xander Harris said evenly. "Now get moving."

Kolya grimaced, but said nothing and started trotting towards the fence to retrieve the ball he'd slogged so far, half-throwing his bat down on the grass as he went.

When he was over the fence and out of earshot, the young woman shrugged an apology to her friend. "Sorry, Snoopy –"

"Don't worry about it, Taz." Xander waved off her helpless expression. "Teenaged whinging I can handle. Besides, he must've been wanted to use that line for weeks now – he needed to get it out before he ruptured something."

"Yeah, I know, but he ought to know better than to feel hard-done-by when we ask him to pick up after himself. You'd think he'd've learned there were heavier crosses to bear...."

He could see the memories in her eyes as she spoke, and he knew without looking that the gaze she was directing over his shoulder had settled on the port facility at Ahuriri across Hawke Bay. _Thousand-yard-stare time, Taz? I can't say I can blame you...._

Only a few months past her twentieth birthday, Tatyana Alekseyevna Zyrianova stood a shade under five-feet-eleven and, while she was leggy and clearly feminine, the Daisy Duke shorts and snug, faded purple singlet she was currently wearing made it perfectly clear that she also had the kind of panther-lean muscle definition that put people in mind of Linda Hamilton in the second _Terminator_ movie. 'Taz' wore her henna-dark hair in a waist-length French braid, and the grey-green eyes set into her gamine face held a near-permanent flash of deviltry; even standing still as she was at the moment, she radiated boundless energy and a formidable confidence that was somehow devoid of conceit. But then again, she had earned the confidence - she'd been on the front lines of an undeclared war since she was fourteen, and had handed the enemy ample punishment in her time – and well knew that indulging in conceit would have been a fast ticket to an early grave.

Even as that thought crossed Xander's mind, Taz's husband caught the shift in her body language and came up behind her, slipping his arms about her waist and kissing her under one ear, offering silent comfort against the bad memories. Michael Bleddyn was a whisker shorter than his wife but had a wolfish power to his own frame. A freckle-faced fellow with close-cropped, gingery-blond hair, currently clad in khaki shorts and a grey singlet marked with the 'Budweiser' of the SEAL team he'd stolen it from, Misha who was only saved from being the picture of a baby-faced assassin by the ruthless resolve lurking behind his topaz eyes and the various scars scattered about his body, including the burns that covered the back of his right hand and forearm and the pencil-thin vertical line that ran from his hairline to the point of his left cheekbone. He'd been right there with Taz from day one of their resistance campaign, and it was just as evident in his bearing that he knew what he was about (despite his being more than a month short of his own twentieth birthday), but his was more a manner of thoughtful intelligence and of a gentle, steady temperament that was somewhat counterintuitive for their chosen profession.

_Man, even if I tell the Scoobies back home how I wound up friends with these two, they're probably not gonna believe it - and they believe in vampires and magic and demons and sixty-foot-long Mayor-snakes,_ the sole American in the group noted ruefully. Actually born Alexander Lavelle Harris, he'd been dubbed 'Xander' by his first and oldest friend when they met in kindergarten. Slightly taller and (subjectively) older than the two New Zealanders, with dark hair and eyes and a face that easily lent itself to laughter, Xander had first entered their lives by appearing out of a portal in the middle of the Hobsonville base in November and asking for the two of them by name. Only, from his viewpoint he'd already known them for some weeks, and they him for some months. It seemed that **they** had first entered **his** life in this coming July, when they had rescued him from a team of assassins as he left his home-sweet-Hellmouth-town of Sunnydale to see America, told him why the assassins had been sent, and promptly had an associate of theirs see to it that he had the proper training to continue in his self-appointed quest to protect his friends from the various 'goblins' in the world. After some adventures in various times and places – they had sent/would send him to the Royal Marines in 1992, where he'd spent more than a year learning the bootneck's trade and gotten into a couple of scrapes on his first and only deployment – that same associate had dropped him off in the middle of Hobsonville, some eight months **before** he'd ever left Sunnydale, to see that his training was completed. Though only after he'd made sure that some of the friends he'd made on deployment were properly set-up to deal with the assassin problem.

The confusion of tenses and logic paradoxes involved in that little back-and-forth made all their heads hurt. Indeed, it had prompted them, one and all, to take up the rallying cry of one Miles Edward O'Brien: "I **hate** temporal mechanics!"

At the moment, though, slightly more immediate headaches were on the young trio's mind, and Misha gently squeezed his wife/lifelong best friend. "You okay in there, _cariad_?" he asked tenderly, his accent a lyrical blend of New Zealander drawl and the lilt of his Welsh birthland.

Taz dropped a hand to his wrist and returned the gentle squeeze. "Yeah, I'm fine - just woolgathering."

"Yeah, well, I'd say you've earned the right," he murmured dryly, giving the newly-rebuilt port a long look himself and unconsciously rubbing at his scarred arm. "Haven't we all...."

"Are you going to start pashing again?" asked a disgusted voice.

All three adults gave the speaker an appalled look. "Katya!" Taz gasped in mock shock, staring at her niece with wide eyes.

"Well, you two suck each other's tongues more than the people on _Melrose Place_ ever did," Katerina Zyrianova pointed out reasonably.

Xander considered that for a moment, then judged, "She's got a point. You two're even randier than I used to be, and I was Sunnydale High's resident horn-dog."

"Who got laid all of twice in high school," Taz noted _sotto voce_.

"Not all of us were seventeen-year-old brides, Taz," Xander returned sardonically.

Taz's eyes flashed, and she was opening her mouth to speak when her mother came out from the kitchen. "Tatyana, Misha, Shura - call for you."

The banter died instantly, and all three young adults exchanged looks. "I thought we had two weeks off?" Xander wondered.

"So did we," Misha noted evenly. "Sounds like something came up – like it always does, every time a bloody coconut.... We'll take it in the Tank, Elena – thanks."

Katya's shoulders had slumped as soon as her grandmother said 'call'. She knew what that meant. "You said you'd be here for my first day at high school!"

Misha waved the other two inside and hugged her gently. "And we meant to be, kiddo," he said gently, rubbing her shoulders soothingly. "But the bad guys usually don't consult our schedules when they make their plans. I promise: we'll be back as soon as we can."

"When?"

"I don't know yet, but I'll let you know when I find out. Now why don't you and Kolya go help your grandmother and Uncle Andrushka with lunch, hmm? We'll be out to eat soon."

- - - - - - - -

Having spent almost forty years in the NZSAS and the black-ops trade, Andrew Hazelton had remodeled his 'home' to reflect the mindset that such an extended career made almost inevitable. The hillside property that he called home was only the visible portion of his little compound; he'd spent a great deal of time, money, and clandestine effort all but hollowing out the hill and filling it with a three-level warren of subterranean chambers, mostly made from old shipping containers, which he had dubbed the Catacombs. He had bunkrooms for twenty people, a small dojo, an armoury that would have impressed the typical survivalist cult... and 'the Tank', a state-of-the-art communications centre that had been especially isolated against electronic eavesdroppers; the only way a signal could get in or out was through a high-bandwidth fibre-optic link he'd hand-laid in the early nineties.

It was this link that interested the three young adults now. When Misha came through the Tank's door and closed it behind him, completing the chamber's EM isolation, Taz punched the button that brought their 'telephone call' – actually a video-conference request - up on the big-screen on the wall. The man on the other end at Hobsonville was a tallish, solidly-built, dark-haired fellow in the undress uniform of a Royal Australian Navy Lieutenant-Commander. "Nice outfit, MacGyver. Catch you at a bad time?"

"Yes, you did, Wombat," Taz said curtly. "I've got my mother, my uncle, and my niece and nephew outside setting up the barbeque. It's a beautiful summer's day, and we're on our first stint of leave in better than a year, so whatever's going on, get your head out of my tits and spit it out, hmm?"

"Hey, don't shoot **me**, okay?" Mike MacDonald protested, raising his hands defensively. "I'm just the messenger. Zorro wants you back up here ASAFP. There's a caper in Latin America that needs your 'specialist experience'."

"Experience with what?" Misha asked evenly.

"The Stormhawks, for one."

Taz and Misha exchanged a serious glance. That could mean any number of things, most of them very bad.

"He also specifically requested that you bring the latest edition of your field notes, Fenris. He's planning the briefing for 0700 tomorrow. Tony's bringing a puddle-jumper down to Napier airfield; he'll be ready to leave again at 1930."

"That gives us most of today, anyway," Taz murmured. "All right, Wombat, we'll be on the plane. But tell Zorro not to expect us to be happy about it."

"I think he already figured that out, MacGyver, but I'll pass it on." MacDonald tapped a key on his console and the screen went blank.

"'Oh, hit me, baby, one more time....'" Xander quoted sourly. _First real down-time I've had in almost five subjective years, and it gets canceled less than a week in. If I ever find out where that guy Murphy is buried, I'm gonna go jump up and down on his grave._

"I hear you, Snoopy," Misha said wearily, completely missing the Britney Spears reference. (Which was understandable – her first single would not make its broadcast debut for another couple of weeks.) "C'mon: let's go make the most of the time we have."

- - - - - - - -

**06:58, MONDAY FEBRUARY 08, 1999, LIMA _(18:58/07-02-99 ZULU)_  
NZSAS 'GOLF TROOP' HEADQUARTERS, HOBSONVILLE, NEW ZEALAND**

Just before the appointed hour, the youthful trio dutifully trooped in Golf Troop's briefing room, clad in the short-sleeved midnight-blue uniform of the New Zealand Paranatural Defence Service; as was NZPDS custom, all three wore holstered pistols and the beret of their parent service, SAS sandy-beige for both Taz and Misha and Royal Marine green for Xander. "So what's the emergency this time, Jim?" Taz asked, over the lip of her second cup of Army-style coffee of the morning.

In a regular-service unit anywhere else in the world, a mere lance-corporal who addressed her (or his) CO by their given name would have been instantly reduced to a smoking grease-stain by the officer's wrath. Special operations units have their own rules and camaraderie, and doubly so in Golf Troop, New Zealand Special Air Service – especially since Golf Troop didn't officially exist, much less officially not exist – so such disdain for the usual punctilio was about the norm. Besides which, given the nature of the campaign they'd fought and that no other member of the New Zealand Army had seen sustained combat since Vietnam, MacGyver and Fenris had the most field-experience and first-hand knowledge of the goblins (and of Stormhawk) out of anyone associated with the New Zealand military, which meant they enjoyed a certain degree of latitude.

Even so, Zorro gave them both a steady look before he spoke. "How does the _Ordo Astra_ getting control of the future of the global micro-electronics industry grab you?"

"Knew we could count on you for our daily dose of doom and gloom," Misha murmured drolly. The _Ordo Astra_ was the largest vampire warrior-sept on record, and since it had gone corporate in the mid-nineteenth century, it had amassed enough money and influence to distort **gravity**, much less the global economy. They were also about the only group of demons anyone had heard of who were possessed of enough collective brains to want to try to **rule** the world, rather than destroy it, and to have an actual decent chance at pulling it off to boot. "How do they propose to do that?"

At Zorro's nod, Wombat tapped a key on his laptop, splashing the first page of his pre-prepared PowerPoint presentation on the briefing room's roll-down screen. "What do you know about a country called Arulco?"

After glancing at his two compatriots, who looked as blank as he did, Xander elected to answer the question. "Nothing's springing to mind."

The image on the screen was a map of the north-western corner of South America, centered on the Ecuador/Peru region. A little square on the coastline between the two nations, stretching from Tumbes in the north to Lobitos in the south, was shaded in light red and marked with a red-white-red national flag. "It's a little _post facto_ consequence of Spanish colonialism in Latin America. When they pulled out of their American possessions in the early nineteenth century, the Spanish didn't leave all that many nice, neat little lines on the maps telling people where their land started and the other guy's ended. Ecuador and Peru fought a couple of wars over defining those lines back in the mid-nineteenth; the second time, around 1847, the Ecuadoreans got lucky and sliced off a chunk of the Peruvian coastline about a hundred miles square. They had enough grunt to turn that new possession into an independent country of its own – Arulco - and enforce recognition of its sovereignty as part of the peace terms. With the implicit threat of Ecuadorean intervention if they tried anything military to reclaim their 'lost territory', the Peruvians restricted their activities to a lot of bluster.

"Arulco's political system was set up on a model that is, as far as I know, unique: a democratic monarchy. Every ten years since the country's foundation in 1848, they've held an election to determine which of the great land-holding families is best suited to run the country; technically, any of those families are eligible, but only two have ever had any real support for the throne, the Cordonas in the north and the Chivaldoris in the south. The Chivaldoris had held power, with only one interruption, since the foundation; they were essentially benevolent moderates, pursuing an even-handed policy of détente with their two neighbours to forestall any trouble. From the audience, the sole exception was...?"

"Nineteen-thirty-eight to nineteen-forty-eight?" Taz said promptly.

"Give her a Krispie!" Wombat crowed ironically. "Absolutely right. The populace saw World War Two on the horizon and decided that during a time of global war, they needed a King whose policies were a little more - shall we say 'vigourous'? The Cordonas got the nod, and they did fairly well during the war years, but when the next election came up, the war was over and so was their time in the drivers' seat. They didn't exactly love that idea and went back to their estates in the north to sulk and plan a return to power – peacefully, mind you; they wanted to do it with the ballot box, not an ammo can.

"Between '48 and '88, King Andreas Chivaldori held onto the reins, but the Cordonas' PR campaigns took ever-larger bites out of the winning margin, and in '87, the Crown's projections showed that the next election could well see the Chivaldoris defeated. Between his own failing health and his wife's death, Andreas knew that he wasn't going to be given another term in his own right, but he couldn't afford to let the Cordonas take over, especially with the recent discovery of mineral deposits in the country that could be either the economy's salvation or its ruination, so he took a punt and started a search for a bride for his only child, his son Enrico." (The PowerPoint brought up a photo of the man in question; taken in 1986 by its timestamp, it showed a Latin man in his late twenties, strong and vital, with the air of command and keen intelligence in his eyes.) "Enrico would be the one in the hot-seat after the next election, and Andreas figured that the electorate's seeing him go through all the pomp and circumstance of a Windsor-esque wedding would put him over the top compared to his rival, Miguel Cordona." (He pulled up another photo, this one dated 1987; the man shown was slightly taller and thinner than Enrico, but clearly possessed much of the same qualities.)

"Andreas' people scoured a lot of the world looking for a suitable candidate, and they looked hard... but given the situation, they also looked **fast**, which makes for mistakes." (A third photo came up, this one from 1988 and showing a moderately attractive strawberry-blonde woman in her early twenties with wide-set green eyes.) "They finally settled on this woman, one Gloria Prescott, from upstate Pennsylvania; Mayflower family, law student, all the right connections to American high society, and more importantly her family had a number of key contacts in the defence industry... including Templar Security Solutions."

"Ah," Misha said, as one undergoing a revelation. The Templar Trading Group was the _Ordo Astra_'s primary 'above-ground' organ, a truly massive multinational conglomerate whose component divisions did business in just about every arena known to man – and many others they didn't like to acknowledge as existing – and Templar Security Solutions was their military-products and –services arm. "'Oh, look what a tasty morsel is dangling before us. And what **is** that little metal thing stuck in it, anyway?'"

"Something like that. They didn't dig deep enough on Templar – or didn't know to start digging in the first place – and snapped her up in a heartbeat. The wedding was everything they'd hoped for, and it had the desired results... but then things started coming off the rails. Six months after the wedding - and four after the election – King Andreas was found dead in his bed. The post-mortem results indicated poisoning, and there was a certain amount of circumstantial evidence pointing to Enrico as the doer."

"Only that doesn't make sense – he already had the top job, so why kill his father?" Taz pointed out rhetorically.

"The Royal Guard appeared not to notice that little irrelevance when they followed Glory's orders and arrested Enrico for regicide," Wombat said in a bland voice. "A week after his arrest, the vehicle transporting Enrico to the courthouse for the trial was Molotov'd and burned out completely, killing all five people inside. Palace sources blamed it on the Cordonas, claiming they were trying to cover up their own involvement in the King's death and that they had gone from peaceful campaigning to armed revolt... possibly at Peruvian instigation. Cue the usual consequences: declaration of martial law, suspension of the normal judicial process 'for the duration of the emergency', 'disappearances' of prominent opponents, massacres of demonstrators by security forces...."

"Very neat," Misha noted, his voice absently professional. "Enrico is attainted for murder and high treason, so he's politically neutralised until the trial; implicate the Cordonas and suggest they're foreign stooges, and they're no longer legitimate candidates; Glory gets the top job by default. Thorough, well-orchestrated, covers all the angles – are you sure Glory was at law school? 'Cause a lot of qualified political-science types couldn't execute something that slick." _Unless they had the Stormers walking them through it; that little scheme certainly has all their fingerprints on it...._

"Except, according to rumour, she tried to get a little too fancy: the convoy was actually intended to turn Enrico over to the Cordonas, in the expectation that they'd kill him as 'an enemy of the people'." Wombat snorted expressively at that one. "Seems she missed one little detail: Enrico Chivaldori and Miguel Cordona were good buddies at Harvard Business School. They never positively identified Enrico's body in the fire – they pinged two of his escorts, but the other bodies were too badly charred for IDs. Best guess is, the Cordonas smuggled him out of the country, faked his death, and kept him under wraps until they got a better bead on what Glory's agenda really was."

"But even if he was still alive, he's still under the taint of high treason," Xander protested. "What good could he do?"

"Inside Arulco? Not much, especially these days." Wombat pulled up a map of the country, then overlaid a map of shadings representing per-capita income. The only 'bright' spots were the capital city of Meduna and Balime, the Arulcan Riviera. "Before '85, the country's economy was essentially entirely based in agriculture; they were completely self-sufficient there, with enough of a surplus to make cash with exports. Throw in off-shore oil-fields near the port-city of Grumm, which brought in enough cash for most of their major capital expenditure, and the individual standard of living was on a Second World level, and approaching First World equivalence. After Glory took over, she forced a complete changeover from agriculture to extraction and exploitation of the various mineral strikes around the country. She tried to do too much too fast, and the result was inevitable: complete economic implosion. Per-capita incomes are less than five percent of what they were fifteen years ago, and it hasn't helped the situation any that Glory completely discontinued all government services in '90 to funnel the money into the mining operations and the military – **all** services, including education, sanitation and health-care, public works other than those supporting the mining operations...."

"Okay, **now** I believe she's a law student!" Xander stared at the Australian in amazement. "She pulled **all** the education funding? Jesus Christ – in another five years, she's gonna have no indigenous source of literate labour!"

Wombat shrugged. "She doesn't seem to think she needs it – she only needs miners and soldiers, and as far as she knows all they have to do is swing picks or shoot things."

"Okay, that's taking stupidity to a height that offends even the King of Cretins!" the Californian muttered in disgust. "Lawyers – talk about having only passing contact with reality...."

"Yeah, but she's smart enough to know that the people with the guns still have most of the clout. The Army's in charge these days, despite everything the Cordonas could do to oppose Glory politically. When they were finally hounded completely underground by government forces four years ago, they finally gave up on internal reform and turned into a guerrilla resistance network, making their estates around the northern border town of Omerta very unpleasant for government troops... until four months ago, when a squadron of Stormer AlphaJets bombed the place back the Jurassic Period just before a full battalion of FRA tanks and mechanised infantry swept through and killed anything that was still breathing – man, woman, child, young or old. They did a real Carthage on the place.

"A month later, a man claiming to be Enrico Chivaldori contacted the US, British, and Russian governments, asking for their assistance in freeing Arulco. The Yanks checked his credentials and DNA – it was on-file in Massachusetts following a bogus rape allegation – and when they confirmed his identity, they were ready to hear what he had to say."

"Why'd they listen?" Xander wondered. "It's not like this penny-ante dictator stuff is something out of the ordinary, and the Mogadishu thing made Clinton say 'unless it's in my backyard, I don't care'."

Wombat pulled up a map of Arulco, this one showing five gold dots scattered about the country. "The mines in the coastal town of Chitzena, the mountain town of Drassen and the main military base at Alma all produce gold or silver. Grumm is the country's sole oil facility – apart from export cash which goes straight into government coffers and/or Glory's bank accounts, it also provides their entire domestic supply of fuel, though you can only get it if you're in the military, one of Glory's hangers-on, or pay eighty bucks a litre on the black market. And **this**," he isolated the last dot, "is why everybody's so interested in Arulco. This mine, just south of the central town of Cambria, produces a high volume and a wide range of 'rare-earth elements'."

"'Rare-earth elements'? That's not a term I'm familiar with," Misha said. Xander was actually a little relieved to see his massively-more-worldly friend demonstrate a lack of knowledge about something.

"Group IIIA on the Periodic Table, also known as the lanthanide series, periodic numbers 57 through 71; scandium and yttrium are usually lumped in with them as well, since they're usually found in the same deposits and share many properties with the lanthanide elements. And despite the name, they're not especially 'rare', as they're more common than gold or silver or platinum. Don't you remember your high-school chemistry? It wasn't all **that** long ago, was it?"

Misha gave the Australian a flat look for the sideswipe. "I was more concerned with the 'blowing shit up' kind of chemistry in high school, smart-arse."

"REEs have a lot of applications in the field of industrial- and micro-electronics; most laser systems use some, for example, including that holographic sight on your pistol. However, their main relevance in this instance is that they also show promise in experiments aimed at producing room-temperature superconductors. They're found in a lot of other countries, but most of them are in countries that the Stormers don't have influence in anymore – the Aussie and European deposits are out of their reach these days, for one thing, and the largest deposits elsewhere in the world are found in 'Longnan clay' in China's Jiangxi province; conversely, the deposits in Arulco are almost ridiculously pure and can be refined easier, meaning they're cheaper to produce in volume."

"Ah, and the Stormer's interest becomes clear," Taz said, having an epiphany of her own. "With full, exclusive control of that mine and its output, the Stormers can put a stranglehold on REEs like de Beers has on the diamond market and mortgage the future of RTSC research - or entirely limit it to their own people. And if the leg-up it gives them lets them actually make RTSCs work with one or more of the minerals they produce –"

"Everybody'll be clamouring for their product and they'll make a killing, or they'll have sole rights on the new hardware and they'll make a killing," Wombat nodded. "Plus, if they can produce RTSC engines or computers, they'll have sole rights to those as well; the entire world will have to buy from them or get left behind, and Templar will have us all by the balls."

"Don't'cha love it when a plan comes together?" Xander observed sardonically. _And if they get that kind of a leg-up on the next generation of high-end computer equipment, what's to stop them putting hard-wired back-doors into it all and reading everybody's mail? Computers that powerful are used mainly for cryptography, and if they get that kind of access to government communications...._ He shuddered at the thought. Seeing Moloch loose in the Internet had been bad enough, and the self-styled Corruptor had done little more than create chaos for his own amusement; if the Stormers could manipulate information to their will on a **methodical** basis, they'd have the whole of humanity in cattle-pens before anyone realised something was wrong. _Just fucking lovely, that is!_ "Okay, so how do things shake out? Who wants what from the Arulcans?"

"CIA has main jurisdiction over the American effort, with strong assistance from DoD and DEA. A month after they first heard from Chivaldori, they'd recruited a sizeable group of mercs and sent them in to bolster the remnants of Cordona's rebel force under the combined banner of the CVLA, the Confederation of Volunteers for the Liberation of Arulco."

"_El Confederación de los Voluntarios para la Liberación de la Arulco_," Misha translated off-hand, just to show Wombat he was still paying attention.

"I'll take your word for it," the intelligence specialist drawled. "The CVLA's had some successes against the government's forces, liberating both Omerta and Drassen from their garrisons in recent weeks; hell, most of the battalion assigned to Drassen defected in place. Thing is, CIA's put strict guidelines on the terms of their involvement and what they expect from a post-war Arulco. One of those was that the CVLA go gunning for the local drug cartel ASAP – one of the local 'businessmen', a joker named Klaus, decided to start farming coca to make ends meet and now he's almost a feudal warlord in control of the area around the town of San Mona. Another was that the State Department and the White House were willing to recognise and protect Free Arulco as an independent nation, on certain conditions, one of which being that the CVLA proves that it is, indeed, a serious player."

"And such 'proof' would be given by, oh, taking Cambria and its mine?" Taz hazarded cynically.

"Can't put much past you, hmm?" Wombat snorted. "That's my understanding, yes; technically, they have to liberate everything north of a certain geographical line, but I'm pretty sure that Cordona can read between the lines as well as you can.

"The Russians are renting them men on a strict cash-and-carry basis, trading warm bodies for silver ore taken from Drassen; since the post-Cold War RIFs they've got a shitload of trained manpower still floating around. They're so far down the dunny they don't have the time or energy to worry about the Arulcan mineral deposits – besides, they've got scads of their own out in Siberia; they just have to start looking for it properly.

"The Poms are hooking the CVLA up with European mercs and supplying them with intel and some weapons-systems, but they're not asking for cash and they haven't set any explicit conditions on their help."

"Makes sense; the Brits have always had more style than the Yanks," Misha murmured.

"Hello, sitting right here!" Xander interjected acerbically.

"Case in point," the Kiwi operator deadpanned, raising a general snicker. "So what's the attraction for the British?"

"They have certain historical ties to Arulco – they did a lot towards training and equipping the Arulcan military back in the '60s, back when the Yanks were distracted by Vietnam – and I think they're using Arulco as a live-fire proving ground for some of their latest hardware. Not to mention jamming a thumb right in Templar's eye."

"Which brings us to the Stormer angle." Misha's eyes had gone as hard as the topaz chips they resembled. Most New Zealanders had seen some nasty stuff out of the Stormers, but that was mainly surface stuff; he and Taz knew their true depths. "What's their involvement?"

"You remember how Ecuador and Peru had themselves a little skirmish over their eastern border back in '95?"

"Yeah. Everybody in the region went shopping for guns right afterwards – they got a little worried when they saw Ecuador beat the Peruvians on points."

"Apparently it put the shits up Glory, too – she seems to think Arulco is the next on the chopping block. And there's a certain degree of justification for that alarm, if you look at the correlation of forces in the border region: the Peruvians have three fighter squadrons within half an hour's flight-time of the border, one of MiG-29s and two of attack birds, not to mention a full brigade of T-62 main battle tanks less than two hours' drive from the line. That being so, Glory took a look at her military and went apeshit at how bad things were – their military operates on a modified Soviet conscription model, and even before the education cuts that wasn't much of a good idea; now, it's a fucking disaster. They've got some capable kit, but even a lot of their newest stuff was in shocking condition because of inadequate maintenance -"

"Until they hooked up with Templar Security Solutions, who started getting them system upgrades and modern equipment, and proper personnel education and training," Taz nodded. "Even after the way our British counterparts have been biting into their operations and their access."

Wombat took a deep breath and reminded himself that these kids weren't **trying** to make him feel redundant; they just knew the workings of Templar's collective mind far better than he did. "Not to mention their providing the necessary training cadre to show the natives how to use it properly. Since the Poms have managed to close down most of their other European sources, the Stormers are mainly getting them French and Italian gear these days. In return, Templar got to take over operations at the mines and the Grumm oil-fields, taking their own cut and giving the rest to the government... with the probable intended end result MacGyver just divined."

"Total manpower in-country?"

"I've got a full analysis of the Arulcan order of battle here, but I'll give you the high points now. Not counting the battalion that defected at Drassen, the government forces, the _Fuerzas Real de Arulco_, can field a total of fourteen Army battalions – five of mechanised infantry, seven infantry, one cavalry, one artillery; their Air Force comes to one squadron of upgraded Mirage F.1C fighters and another of AlphaJet trainer/attackers, plus a squadron of _Hind_ helicopter gunships and an assortment of fixed- and rotor-wing transports; and their Navy totals one frigate equivalent to one of our ANZACs, four missile boats, and about a dozen torpedo-armed patrol boats. Stormhawk Security Forces garrison the remaining government mines and the oil platforms off Grumm, operate two more AlphaJet squadrons out of the primary airbase at Meduna, and man the four SAM batteries scattered about the country... best estimate on total Stormer manpower is on the order of twenty companies total, scattered about in one- and two-company detachments." Wombat gave them all a steady look. "There are also four battalions of 'élite Royal Guards' stationed in the capital city of Meduna, with two more companies of Stormers attached. Companies from the Special Purposes Group."

"**Shit**," Taz breathed. The SPG was Stormhawk's commando unit, and they were damned near as good as they thought they were; hell, given where they'd originally been recruited from, **regular** Stormers weren't exactly wimps. "Twenty line companies and two more of SPG? I didn't know they **had** that kind of manpower in the Americas!"

"Which makes trimming it back a damned good idea, and the sooner the better," Misha noted. "And why are **we** here, in particular?"

"One of the senior American mercs put in a call to the British yesterday," Zorro supplied calmly. "It seems they had an 'incident' at the Drassen mine a few days ago; he'd heard rumours that they had a special unit that might have some experience in dealing with... 'unusual problems', and he had one. Leaving aside the fact that most of our teams are either over in Oz teaching their Special Purposes Detachment the trade or off on capers, you two are our resident experts on both the goblins and on Stormhawk, and considering that those are two of their biggest worries right now, you're it."

"And Snoopy?" the topaz-eyed Kiwi asked mildly. "With all respect, Zorro, you've got no authority to order him anywhere."

"No, but I do," Xander inserted, a little testily. "What, d'you think I can't hack it out there?" _God, are they going the whole 'fray-adjacent' route on me too?_

"There's only one way to find out, but that's not the issue," Misha countered evenly. "We need your insight into the Scoobies if we're going to pull off the Sunnydale caper, and you can't tell us too much if you get your head blown off in some Latin American sideshow."

"This just in, Fenris: **I'm** not the one whose absence would cause a temporal paradox, remember? You and MacGyver and Andrushka - all three of you were there on that Virginia lay-by to save my ass from the Mentors this coming July. If one of **you** gets zapped, our entire timeline could come unglued. Me? There's already one of me running around out there, and even that's probably one too many; I've left you three and Colt time-delay packages with all you need to know in case I get zapped; and if we want to preserve the timeline **I** need to be there to make sure **you** don't get slotted!"

Misha and Taz gave their friend a steady, appraising look, traded a split-second glance, then nodded to each other. It was Taz who answered his heated words. "Okay. You want in? It's all yours. But if the universe blows up because you get killed, I'm gonna kick your ass."

"Duly noted." Xander shrugged one shoulder. "Besides, I just finished that medical course you set up for me, and you need a corpsman. Where else am I going to get the practical experience I need?"

"South Central LA?" Misha suggested blandly, then looked to Zorro. "Okay, it looks like that's the three of us on board. Who else are you giving us?"

"Hulk for commo and heavy weapons," the Colonel supplied readily. "Wombat here has volunteered in his capacity as intelligence analyst and liaison, with Tone supplementing the on-ground logistics staff and assisting with the training programmes and a former shipmate of theirs named Trevor Colby as an additional shooter, but the Aussies are having a little trouble finding Colby at the moment so they'll have to catch up with you in the US."

Taz nodded again, tacitly but officially accepting operational command of the NZSAS/NZPDS detachment to the CVLA. "How do we get there?"

"We've 'disappeared' one of those Global Expresses we picked up as surplus when the Stormers left New Zealand – you fly out at noon today, with a refueling stop at LAX before you go on to Brize Norton to mate up with the team Ultraviolet are chopping to the CVLA. From there, it's a C-17 via MacDill to Panama, where you'll change flights to a 'civilian' C-130 for the last leg to arrive in-country."

"Well, at least we're going to our fate in style and comfort for the first couple of legs," Xander drawled. "Why can't we **always** travel on long-range VIP jets?"

"Because, my friend, the universe has no concept of 'justice'," Misha observed softly, and for once Xander had no smart answer.


	3. Conferences

**07:17, WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 10, 1999, LIMA _(07:17/10-02-99 ZULU)_  
RAF BRIZE NORTON, OXFORDSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM**

Allegedly, the sun would rise in the next half-hour, but being that it was winter in England, no-one on the ground could have proven it conclusively. Between the biting cold and the sullen grey overcast and the steady, unrelenting drizzle whose every droplet seemed to contain a microscopic core of misery that soaked through the skin directly into the soul, even the ducks were staying home by the fire... which actually had its upside. Very few people hang around to rubberneck at RAF transport bases in the first place; at such an hour in such unpleasant weather (with the promise of deteriorating even further any minute – there was snow in the forecast), the number doing so in this instance was precisely zero, which was to the good. After all, deniable operations are so much easier to deny if there are no witnesses.

Captain Sheila 'Scope' Sterling, formerly of British Army Intelligence, shrugged a little deeper into her greatcoat and tugged her collar higher, trying to keep out a little more of the rain out as she stood just inside the two-metre-wide gap between the hangar's main doors, watching the 'Follow Me!' cart lead a very pretty execu-jet towards her while her own contingent made their own final pre-embarkation checks behind her. _I just hope that these people are all they're reputed to be; we're likely to look very foolish to our Arulcan hosts otherwise._

A stocky woman in her early forties with short blonde hair and a square face dominated by a sharp nose, Scope knew she was no supermodel; but then, most supermodels hadn't received tertiary qualifications from a well-known institution some fifteen miles to the east of where she now stood, nor had many supermodels spent three years performing undercover surveillance operations in Northern Ireland with what had once been 14 Detachment, an intelligence unit that had been a key player in anti-IRA operations for decades and was virtually part of the SAS. And she was _quite_ sure that not a single supermodel had ever encountered 'Code Fives' during their work, survived the experience through quick thinking and physical prowess, and undergone SAS-equivalent training to learn how to combat both those Code Fives and their human servitors. Scope had participated in more than seventeen 'black' strikes against Templar satellite companies and Stormhawk bases in Europe in the last year alone, and she had all the scars to prove that she'd been there and done that.

"Sheila, do come in out of the rain; they'll be here in a few moments regardless of whether or not you're waiting to meet them."

Scope glanced back over her shoulder at the man who'd addressed her in a public school accent every bit as dignified as her own. "And let these Dominion types think that I lack the stomach for a little bad weather, Sidney? I fear I'll need to make a better impression than that."

Sidney Nettleson gave her a steady look; he'd known and worked with her for almost eleven years now, and he had his own ideas about what was due to her, as opposed to a 'normal' officer. "You might do a better job of garnering their respect with a show of good sense than one of resilience, Sheila. It's my understanding that these fellows **are** all enlisted personnel, which will give them something of a different perspective... and certain opinions about ruperts," he added, twitting her a little. Sidney had left the Royal Marines as a sergeant.

"Opinions that coincide with your own, I don't doubt," she returned blandly, her attention still on the Global Express rolling down the taxiway.

"I can't imagine why they wouldn't; after all, ruperts are ruperts the world over."

-

Once the Global Express had come to a halt inside the hangar, all four passengers disengaged their seat-belts and gathered their carry-on bags disembarked as promptly as possible. As he was unbuckling his belt, Xander glanced out the window at the other end of the hangar, where a conspicuously unmarked C-17 _Globemaster_ was being loaded – not only with personnel and equipment crates, as one might have expected, but also with a number of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Noting certain key details, he nudged Misha with one elbow as he went past and pointed out the four-wheelers with a tilt of his chin. "Check it out."

Misha crouched to follow his friend's gaze – and blinked. "SOVs! Very nice..."

"Land Rover Special Operations Vehicles – heirs to the tradition of the SAS Jeeps and countless earlier models of Land Rover. Looks like we might be doing some deep raiding while we're down there."

"Best way to keep the FRA off-balance so they don't just swamp us with numbers," Taz noted with absent professionalism, taking a look herself; Xander noted, with a twinge of compassion that he was careful to hide lest she tear into him for it, that she was still paper-white even though they'd been on the ground for almost ten minutes. "We might want think about trying to knock back their air-power, too."

"I think they've got that covered," rumbled Hulk, indicating the roll-cage weapons mounts on four of the six SOVs. "Those look familiar..."

"Great shades of Elvis!" Xander blurted. "They're sending a system **that** new into Arulco?"

"'Field-testing', remember?" Hulk noted, not unkindly. "Best way to see if they work under the worst possible circumstances."

_Tropical country with horrendous heat and humidity, no proper servicing depots or support facilities, indigenous operators of dubious literacy and mathematical ability, much less technological acculturation – yeah, that's pretty close to 'worst possible conditions',_ Xander noted wryly. "Yeah, well, standing here and gossiping isn't gonna get the job done, is it? C'mon, let's go."

Taz was naturally the first one out of the plane; in her haste to get out onto the tarmac, she stumbled on the air-stair and almost collided with the woman waiting at the bottom – only Misha's swift reflexes in catching her arm prevented a nasty spill for all involved. "Thanks, sweetheart," she told him over her shoulder, then looked to her reception committee. "Not the best entrance I could have made, but I guess it'll have to do. Captain Sterling?"

"Yes, but call me Scope," the stern-looking blonde nodded. "I take it you're Warrant Officer Zyrianova?" (In both the NZPDS and Sterling's UKPDS, all front-line enlisted personnel were considered warrant officers, so that any outsiders they dealt with wouldn't get too snippy about getting expert advice from junior enlisted.)

"It's 'MacGyver', and yeah, what's left of her," Taz said ruefully, giving the Global Express a hateful look before becoming all business once more. "When do we leave for Arulco?"

"Once the last of the gear is loaded – it looks like that'll be in about an hour's time."

"Good – at least I can get some coffee to travel on before I get back in one of those damn' things," Taz muttered sourly. "The rest of my personnel: my translator you already know -"

"All too well, I'm afraid," Scope said dryly, nodding to Misha. "Going to shoot up any public venues whilst you're in Arulco?"

The scar-faced man gave her a 'you're-**too**-funny' look. "I wasn't planning on it, but we'll see what happens," he drawled. _Man, am I **ever** gonna live that caper down? It's not like I **planned** to get into a firefight in the middle of the British Museum..._

"- This is our medic Snoopy, from the Sunnydale Hellmouth by way of the Royal Marines -" Taz continued.

"Ah, yes, young mister Harris. Exactly how **are** you managing to be in two places at once?" Scope wondered.

"Trade secret, Cap'n. Even if I could tell you, I'm not sure you'd believe it," the once-and-future-Slayerette said ruefully.

"You'd be surprised by the degree to which this line of work has broadened my horizons," she returned blandly.

"I don't doubt it, Captain, but it's not my story to tell."

"Fair enough."

"- And lastly, Hulk, our communications and heavy weapons specialist. You may have noticed he's a healthy-sized sort of fellow – that's because he's half Maori and half Samoan."

"And the rest is what, mountain troll?" Scope asked faintly, watching Corporal Anton Hauraki squeeze out through the GE's hatch. Her reaction was not an uncommon one; Hulk was better than two metres tall and built like the steroid-bolstered crossing of a professional wrestler and a rogue Grizzly bear.

"Captain," the man-mountain said in a voice that could be felt through the soles of one's feet, offering her his most disarming smile and one dinner-plate-sized hand to shake. Scope accepted it, a little nervously, but Hulk had long since learned to control his strength. "I heard your people were taking this seriously, but I didn't realise that Major Rice would commit his second-in-command to an open-ended operation like this."

"So close to Operation SUCKER PUNCH, you mean?" Scope shook her head. "We're only committing one team of our own people – the rest we picked up in the community."

"The mercenary community, or goblin-hunters?" Taz asked pointedly.

"A little of both – of course not forgetting how much overlap there is between the two."

Taz snorted, but let that wry truth slide. "Any more idea on what we're supposed to be dealing with once we get down there?"

Scope winced and shook her head, motioning towards the loading area; Taz and her crew followed her as she started to move that way. "All we know is that the CVLA has lost seven more miners and three guards since the first report, and they've had to concede five more levels to whatever's coming up from the depths of the mine."

"I just hope it isn't a Balrog, 'cause I lost Gandalf's number," Xander inserted helpfully.

Taz gave him a piercing glare. "**I** do the Tolkien references around here, sunshine, not you." _And come the start of filming in October, God help Peter Jackson if he screws up, or I'm gonna make him wish **he** was the one fighting the Balrog..._

"You got it - Éowyn," the Californian smirked.

This earned him another dirty look, but in a way Taz was thankful for the jibes; between the mind-numbing jet-lag and having to fly in the first place, she could use a couple of laughs (or groans) before getting on another goddamned aeroplane. "So how are we fixed for ammo?" she asked Scope. "Since we don't know what the threat is –"

"We're packing a little of everything," the Englishwoman assured her. "We've got graphite rounds for Code Fives and aye-gees in case of lycanthropes – ten thousand rounds of each in nine millimetre Parabellum and five thousand each of five-five-six – as well as ten thousand rounds of those twelve-gauge general-purpose rounds you call 'spookbusters'. We're also taking the CVLA a substantial shipment of modern small arms and missile systems, in case the government gets some bright idea into its head about bombing Drassen."

"Sounds like a plan," Taz nodded. _And if we run into something we don't have ammo for? Well, we'll have to follow Taz's First Law of Combat: "When in doubt – improvise."_ She glanced at her husband and tipped her head a little; he nodded and stepped away half a pace or so, taking Hulk and Xander with him so that she could speak to Scope quasi-privately. "One other thing, Captain. I hear you're a good troop, but with all due respect I don't yet know how you think and I need to say this up front: our contingent, us and the Aussies? We work **with** you, not **for** you, so don't assume you have the right to order my people around. In combat, you're senior and we'll treat you as our CO, but when it comes to dealing with other units, you don't speak for us - we do. Understood?"

Scope bristled a little, ready to read the younger woman the riot act... then caught herself, realising that this was not insubordination but candour. "You're rather a small party to be speaking for yourselves at the levels as you're likely to need to in Arulco."

"We're also more experienced at goblin-busting than you are, Captain, so anyone ignoring us would do it at their own peril." Taz's eyes were as unyielding as emeralds.

Scope met the younger woman's gaze for a long moment, holding her ground, then nodded a little – not yielding the point, but accepting it. _My word – I'd heard tales of this 'MacGyver's' strength of personality, but I'd never have expected them to be so close to the mark!_ "In the interests of your surviving continued air travel, we've arranged rooms at the visitor's quarters. You won't have a chance to sleep before we leave, unfortunately, but you can shower and get something to eat at the NAAFI."

Taz startled her with a crooked grin. "One of the benefits of flying VIP-class – we showered on the plane. But if you've got coffee, Captain - and the stronger, the better – this may be the start of a beautiful partnership."

-

**08:00, FEBRUARY 10, 1999, LIMA (13:00/10-02-99 ZULU)  
****MILITARY SITUATION ROOM, ROYAL PALACE  
****MEDUNA, KINGDOM OF DRASSEN**

Gloria Prescott Chivaldori, Arulco's self-declared Queen for Life, walked into the situation room with the ever-present pair of Stormhawk-trained Royal Guardsmen a step behind her, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floor and the scent of 'Obsession' trailing behind her. Her strapless, backless green Dior gown was a sharp contrast to the array of uniforms around her as she entered. "Well, Elliott, what news today?"

Elliott Vittorio, technically her Chief of Staff and Minister of Defence, looked up from the map-table with an expression not unlike that of a rabbit seeing a snake. "N-n-no news, my Queen. Our troops have not encountered rebel forces since Friday."

"Why not? What are they doing?"

"Th-the rebels appear to be holding their positions around the town of Drassen, Majesty."

"They're just sitting there? Why?"

"Our analysts believe they're building up their supply stockpiles before they undertake further operations."

Glory turned and gave the speaker a piercing glare. Most of the men present were dressed in FRA dress uniforms, complete with sashes and full medals and brightly gleaming rank-braids. By comparison, the utilitarian simplicity of General Maximillian Forster's unadorned tan uniform and the four six-pointed ochre cloth stars on his epaulettes was a blot of oil on the tablecloth at the Coronation Ball, and almost as welcome; every man in the room resented the Stormers' presence in their country, much less this council.

Nonetheless, Forster met the Queen's glare with an equanimity that was very, very rare in Arulco these days, much less in the councils of a woman who had made a personal habit of literally shooting the bearers of ill tidings. He'd survived commanding a motor-rifle regiment in the NVA, the East German Army, under the worst excesses of the Communists and their _Stasi_ secret police; dealing with superiors who didn't want to acknowledge reality was nothing new to him. "Their backers have seen to it that their combat forces have a solid core of veterans, many of them volunteer ex-servicemen or outright mercenaries, but they need a substantial indigenous force to give their operations the appearance of legitimacy and preserve the façade of an internal civil war. And training, equipping and feeding a force that large requires staggering amounts of _matériel_, even if many of them **are** ex-conscripts like many of the indigenous 'Volunteers' must be."

"Then cut off their supplies and make this little problem go away," Glory suggested sweetly.

"It's not that simple, Highness. Their transports fly too low for the SAM site east of Drassen to engage them effectively. Nor can our aircraft get to them; we can't violate Ecuadorean airspace without giving them a perfect pretext for open intervention, and for the five minutes they spend in the air inside our borders, they're protected by the same modern SAM systems that prevent us from simply bombing Drassen itself. The only aircraft that could attack one of those supply-flights without being shot down itself would be an F.1C armed with Aspide missiles –"

"**Out of the question!**" the Queen bit out. "If we take those Mirages off our border, the Peruvians will be on us like piranha on a bleeding cow! God, their _Frogfoot_ attack fighters are less than twenty minutes from here!"

Forster took a deep breath to check his own temper. "It would take only two fighters, Highness, and the aircraft in question would be to Drassen and back within forty minutes – far too short a time for the Peruvians to react to exploit any perceived gap."

"I said it's out of the question, General," Glory said icily. "Any more bright ideas?"

"We can't destroy it from the air, which only leaves re-taking it on the ground," suggested Colonel Javier Pedroza. "My Fourth Dragoons can do it in less than a week."

"The Colonel's enthusiasm is heartening but misplaced, Majesty," Forster said quickly. "While they have modern armoured vehicles, the Fourth has yet to undergo their scheduled refurbishment cycle; much of their equipment is crippled by maintenance problems and the bulk of their troops are conscripts, poorly trained and indifferently motivated." _Not to mention their commanding officer's a clueless, self-important ass!_

"How much training does a battalion of mechanised infantry really need to run off a bunch of raggedy-ass farmers armed with shotguns and pitchforks?" Pedroza sneered.

"Ask the Russians," Forster returned tightly. "They never managed it when they faced the Afghan _mudjehadeen_. Majesty, if we must make a ground attack on Drassen, let's make one that is strong enough to succeed despite any possible opposition."

"What do you propose, General?"

"We helicopter one company from the 4th Airborne Rangers into the jungle east of Drassen to carry out close reconnaissance of the town and its defences. Then we take the Third Grenadier Guards Regiment from the Brigade of Guards here in the capital and move it up to Cambria to link up with the Fifth Fusiliers Regiment and Second Brigade's cavalry troop – all of those units have been fully refurbished, they're a match for any mechanised unit found in the First World, much less anything the rebels can field. They move north to fake an attack on Omerta, then swing east and go for the airfield at the north end of Drassen. At the same time, we chopper two more companies from the 4th Rangers up to link up with their comrades, and they advance on the mine at the south end of the town, playing anvil to the armoured units' hammer. I'll grant you it's not a small or subtle operation, but it **will** be decisive."

"It's total overkill, my Queen, and far too extravagant and expensive an operation to mount to deal with a couple of hundred guerrillas with nothing heavier than rifles," Pedroza countered.

"'No heavy weapons', Colonel?" Forster asked incredulously. "Our sources report that as much as two-thirds of the 7th Rifle Regiment defected in place when the rebels took Omerta, taking all their heavy equipment with them, and the same story was repeated when the 10th Rifles were overrun in Drassen. Both formations had FRA-issued MILAN missiles and Carl Gustav rocket launchers, as well as SA-14s."

"'Your sources', Stormer, are paid informants who're telling you exactly what you want to hear so they'll keep getting paid," the Arulcan officer sneered. "**Our** intelligence tells us that the 7th and 10th died in place to the last man and any prisoners taken were promptly executed. The rebels have no anti-tank weapons, and even if they did, they have no-one who could operate them; they're a collection of illiterate peasants and hireling lackeys who will flee as soon as they even think a tank is headed their way – and the Fourth Dragoons have almost thirty tanks and fifty IFVs and APCs. Those who don't die under our guns or flee into the woods will be crushed under our treads."

Mein Gott_, he's actually taken that propaganda-piece intelligence assessment the Arulcan Royal Intelligence Service wrote at face value!_ Forster realised in barely-concealed horror. _This idiot is making military decisions on the basis of his own aristocratic prejudices and the self-preserving fantasies of an intelligence machine Glory's rule has turned into a pack of yes-men who can't tell her anything she doesn't want to hear without getting shot as defeatists!_

"We don't need three whole battalions to crush this rebellion, my Queen; the Fourth Dragoons can do it alone," Pedroza repeated, not knowing what was going on behind Forster's impassive face. "Give us the freedom to do so."

"Your Majesty –" Forster began.

Glory cut him off with a raised hand. "Your plan is too complex, General, and I can't spare the Rangers or the Grenadiers; they're needed where they are to protect vital installations -"

_To protect you and your home here in Meduna and the lily-white asses and multi-million-dollar villas of your rich cronies in Balime, you mean!_ Forster thought venomously.

"- And the loyalty of the Fifth Fusiliers is open to question."

_Because when we Stormhawks retrained and re-equipped them just last year, we appointed officers and non-coms whose primary concern was with doing their jobs, and since they're not falling over themselves to kiss your ass, you doubt their allegiance._

Forster cocked a wry mental eyebrow at that. _As well you should, come to think of it..._ "Be that as it may, your Majesty, what do you suggest?"

"Colonel Pedroza's Fourth Dragoons will be ample to deal with the problem. They'll do it."

"With respect, you Highness –"

"My decision is **made**, General," she said coldly, and Forster recognized the finality in her tone. "How soon can the attack go in?"

"I need three days to get my people ready to move and another two to get them up to the jumping-off point – I should be ready to launch the assault by Tuesday morning. I'll telephone you an after-action report from the café at the Drassen airfield Tuesday evening, my Queen," Pedroza assured her.

"Good. General Forster, see to the details. Now, if we're done, I have some traitors to feed to the bloodcats," Queen Glory said casually, and swept out of the room, trailing 'Obsession' and her bodyguards in her wake.

Swallowing his first reaction, Forster turned back to those gathered about the table. "Very well. Mister Vittorio, have I your permission to proceed as necessary?"

"Huh? W-why, yes, General. Yes, you, you may proceed as necessary," Elliott nodded frantically, then withdrew after his Queen as quickly as he could, so as to assure her of his devotion to her.

"Very good, Minister." _Because I intend to interpret 'as necessary' as broadly as I can._ "Colonel Pedroza, you are to plan and execute an assault on the rebel-held town of Drassen as soon as practicable. I'm going to cut orders to Brigadier Vega to chop both of Second Brigade's artillery batteries and its entire cavalry squadron to your command, to be used to support the operation – and Colonel, you **will** make maximum use of both your reconnaissance assets and your artillery. I'm also going to order 17 Squadron's AlphaJets readied to serve as close air support on request from your fire-support coordinator, rebel SAMs notwithstanding. If you're going to be the one making this attack, Colonel Pedroza, I'm going to do my damnedest to make it succeed despite your involvement."

Pedroza bristled, and Forster had to hide a smile at how easy it was to manipulate the hidebound little suckup. "When I've crushed these rebels, **Stormhawk**, the Queen will personally pin your rank-boards onto my shoulders."

_I rather doubt that you'll live that long, Colonel,_ Forster judged silently, not exactly heartbroken at the prospect._ And the Queen? Well, she really should have studied the wisdom of "The Evil Overlord's Check-List", especially its 17th precept: "When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice." And learning that lesson is going to cost her dearly – to the tune of your entire Regiment for a start, I think..._


	4. Roll out the welcome wagon

**01:07, FRIDAY FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA _(06:07/12-02-99 ZULU)_**  
**SAM SITE "FIREBASE ARTURO"**  
**14KM EAST-SOUTH-EAST OF DRASSEN, KINGDOM OF ARULCO**

"What is it, Jacobs?"

The Stormhawk corporal manning the display for the site's primary KNIFE REST-A surveillance radar glanced up at his supervising Warrant Officer-2. "Bogey entering detection range from the north, sir – on their current speed and heading, they'll enter Arulcan airspace in about four minutes."

"Identification?"

"Skin-paint only, sir, no transponder signal, but it's got to be big for me to be painting it at this distance. I'd say a transport, Hercules size or better – wait, **second** contact at the edge of range! It, uh... it looks like it's on the same flight-plan as the first one, same original bearing, same course and speed."

"Y'know, if we could scramble a couple of Mirages for an intercept, we could really ruin their day for 'em," the supervisor noted thoughtfully. "Or maybe say '_¡Bienvenidos!_' with a little artillery."

"If only Glory wasn't so fuckin' stupid," the radar-operator muttered under his breath.

"If Glory was smart enough to win the war on her own, we wouldn't have a job right now, Jacobs," was the undertone response, "and if her people hear you comment on that fact, we could **both** get shot. I can't stop you **thinking** it... just don't ever **say** it, okay?"

"You got it, Mister F."

- - - - - - - -

**01:21, FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA _(06:21/12-02-99 ZULU)_**  
**DRASSEN AIRFIELD**  
**FREE ARULCO**

The 'civilian' C-130H slewed around in a tight semi-circle on the taxiway, coming to a halt with its ramp facing the hangar, ran up its engines and killed them. The propellers had barely begun to slow before the ramp whined down, and the first SOV was off the back so fast that its passengers were almost jolted over the sides onto the tarmac when the front wheels dropped the last foot to the ground.

Shifting his jarred spine a little to ease the ache, Xander/Snoopy gave the back of the driver's head a dirty look, but he couldn't put too much heat on it. Just climbing a ladder put Taz/MacGyver into a cold terror-sweat, so _flying_... _What was it she said? 'I'm SAS-trained, so I associate with aeroplanes in two ways: I jump out of them – or I blow them up. Doing one gives me **more** than ample motivation to do the other.'_

A bare moment later, the SOV came to a sharp halt inside the hangar, out of the view of overly curious eyes. Way ahead of Snoopy's mental processes on the matter, Misha/Fenris slid down from his seat to pull MacGyver out of the driver's seat and haul her into a tight, comforting embrace that somehow didn't look at all awkward or strange despite their being wrapped up in equipment and bristling with weaponry. "It's okay, _cariad_, we're down now," he breathed into her ear. "We're okay."

"Th-the unloading -"

"The MacDonalds and I worked that out during the changeover in Panama," he assured her, cutting off her commander's worries. "We've got it all under control. Just sit down and take it easy, all right?"

Ordinarily, she might have tried to out-stubborn him... but that was a long, mentally demanding process with no guarantee of success, even for her, and right now she was simply too shattered to try. "O-okay."

With that, she slid out of his arms, sat down against the SOV's front tyre, laid her G36 across her lap, and almost instantly fell into an exhausted sleep.

The second SOV pulled up next to them, with the MacDonald brothers in the front seats and two more Aussies in the back. One of them took a single glance at MacGyver and let his mouth do his thinking. "Typical bloody tart – always 'unavailable' when there's work to be done," he snorted. "I always said _hhhhkkkk_!"

One instant, Tim 'Numb' Sutton was leaning over the side of the Rover's tray; the next, he'd been bodily hauled out and was being pressed back against it, his feet an inch off the ground, his spine creaking against the metal, his larynx blocked off by Snoopy's forearm. "One: a 'tart' is a piece of pastry. That young **woman** sitting there is your commanding officer, you fuckwit," the Californian hissed into the older man's face. "Two: she can out-fight, out-work, and most definitely out-think you any day of the fucking **year**; she just really doesn't like flying. Three: count your blessings that **I** got to you first. Fenris might've **killed** your ass, and MacGyver might not have been even **that** forgiving."

"Snoop," Fenris said mildly.

"Just making a point," the Californian returned in a similar tone, dropping the big punk back onto the tarmac and turning a glare on the second SOV's other passenger, Trevor Colby. "You wanted to bring this shitbird along: do us all a favour and keep him on a leash. I don't have time to keep charging him with felony _stupid_."

The former Scooby then did the very smart thing of walking away to recover his own temper.

"Always said bloody Seppos can't take a joke," Numb muttered sourly, massaging his throat.

Fenris looked at him for a long moment with an odd smile, then drawled, "So **that's** what that tattoo around your neck means."

"Eh?"

"'Tear along dotted line,'" the younger trooper said evenly, and his amber eyes were as feral as his namesake's. "You might want to keep your mouth shut from now on: you'll live longer. Trevor?"

Colby took a single glance at the younger man's expression and took the hint, dragging Sutton away to assist with unloading the Hercules... and running straight into Hulk. The big 'Nesian gave Colby an impassive nod, then raised one hand and palmed Numb's face, his fingers wrapping almost completely around the man's head like a facehugger out of _Alien_. "Hulk... _crush_?" he asked mildly, starting to exert pressure, hardly noticing the fingers clawing at his forearm to try to pry his grip loose.

"Stand down, big man - he gets the message," Fenris drawled.

Hulk ignored the order for a moment or two, calmly raising his arm and effortlessly lifting Numb some six inches off the ground, his boots kicking wildly... then opened his hand again, dropping the loudmouth back onto the tarmac. "Hulk... have better ways to waste time," he announced, still in his 'Cro-Magnon' voice, and moved out of the Aussies' way.

Distinctly unnerved by the display of raw power, Trevor shoved Numb towards the plane as fast as he could. _Gawd! Army Commando or not, I'm **really** startin' t' think Tim's more trouble than he's worth..._

- - - - - - - -

"Captain Stirling?"

Scope looked away from the cargo manifest she'd been going over with Tone and Sidney to take in the owner of that thickly-accented voice. Dressed in the _Bundeswehr_ '_flecktarn_' camouflage BDUs and blue beret that had become the CVLA's standard uniform, the man was about average height, with a pronounced nose and the _mestizo_ complexion/bone-structure that marked him as a native Arulcan; he wore a corporal's two stripes on his shoulder-straps. "Yes – and who might you be?"

"I am Dmitri," he nodded politely. "_Señor_ Cordona send me with message. He say he want to talk to you and your senior officers at Army base command room at 0745. He say he want to give you chance to sleep and get organised before he talk to you."

"Please extend my compliments to _Señor_ Cordona, and tell him that we'll be there."

"'Your compliments'?" Dmitri repeated, with a baffled expression. "I tell him."

With that, he left them to their discussions.

"**Not** the sharpest knife in the drawer, that one," Tone murmured.

"Indeed," Sidney agreed. "But that was interesting. That _Señor_ Cordona should want to meet with us is no surprise; that he should be willing to wait to do so under the circumstances is... a little curious."

"We can't give him coherent answers if we're dead on our feet from jet-lag, Sid," Tone pointed out dryly, then looked back at the manifest. "Scope, that joker Greco, the airport cargo-master? He reminds me of a butcher I used to know who had a thumb that weighed half a pound, and I don't see any sign of a proper inventory system around here. Once I get our stuff squared away, I'm gonna see if I can make some sense out of this dog's breakfast, just so he doesn't 'lose' some of the gear we need the most."

"You're going to create an inventory system from scratch?" the Englishwoman asked mildly.

"Doesn't look like I've got much choice, does it?" the Aussie drawled ruefully. "That shifty bastard's probably robbing the Confederacy's supply shipments like Ned fucking Kelly, and that kind of pilfering could kill 'em. I don't think we've got enough credibility to demand his removal just yet, do you?"

"Quite. Very well – don't forget to let your own 'commander' know what you'll be up to, all right?"

- - - - - - - -

Despite their anticipating and planning for a complete lack of heavy-lifting equipment, it still took most of an hour to get the two Hercs unloaded and back into the air. The guide they'd been given by the locals turned out to be a stocky, round-faced American woman by the name of Ira Smythe with a Brooklyn accent that could saw wood.

Quarters were easy enough to arrange, in a way, but certainly reflected both the mentality of the FRA and the... complex relationships between the three main elements of the CVLA – the foreign volunteers, the indigenous Arulcan resistance and their related militia, and the former FRA units which had defected. The Tenth Rifle Regiment, the light-infantry battalion which had been the sector's garrison up until the Battle of Drassen, had been quartered between the town itself and the mine complex in a 'temporary' barracks that gave Snoopy flashbacks to various movies and TV series about Vietnam. The few permanent buildings were large and spacious, and actually had most of the modern amenities that the rest of Drassen had been forced to go without since Glory's coup: electricity (albeit from an on-site diesel generator), air-conditioning, running water, indoor plumbing, even a small but moderately well-equipped infirmary with a helipad for emergency cas-evacs. However, being that this was a 'temporary' camp, only the officers and chosen non-coms had had these luxuries; the bulk of the enlisted men had been put into encampments that looked (to Snoopy's young, TV-taught eye) like something out of _MASH_ or _China Beach_: platoon-sized tents, open-air showers with plywood modesty panels, and the ever-popular pre-fab latrines with 'septic tanks' that were merely halved fuel-drums, ready for diesel incineration.

While the actual nature of those arrangements had yet to change, the manner in which they were allocated had been... revised a little since the Battle of Drassen.

Snoopy glanced out through the door-flap of the tent the Ultraviolet/_Kehua_ team had been assigned, taking in the camp's layout. "Now, I can understand putting the families of everybody who's signed up with the CVLA – militia, guerrilla or former FRA – into the camp's permanent buildings: we all know that they're being looked after as best as possible and it generates good-will. Putting the 'officers' and their 'enlisteds' in the same quarters makes sense – it breaks down the barriers between them, eliminates the resentment the FRA setup would create, makes 'em more likely to listen to – and fight for – each other. With the grunts, putting the FRA defectors, the foreign volunteers and the militia troopers/guerrillas into three separate cantonments, I get – it's a political thing that puts everybody on an equal footing, even if it keeps 'em apart a little to avoid scuffles over who's a 'true patriot'. But why is **our** cantonment so much further from the command centre than the others?"

"Also politics, Snoop," Fenris noted, setting his Bergen at the foot of his fold-a-cot and sitting down to inspect his StG-77 Steyr. "Cordona needs our help to win the war, and he knows it, but if it looks like he's dancing to our tune, Glory can paint him as a puppet of foreign interests -"

"- Which the populace will be encouraged to believe means **Peruvian** interests, thus driving them into her camp out of fear of subversion or invasion," the Californian nodded, recognising that he was being given another semi-subtle lesson in Realpolitik 101. "So he keeps us a little further from the seat of command and/or power to emphasise the fact that we're hirelings and to deny Glory a propaganda opportunity."

"That's about the size of it," his friend nodded.

"Glad it's not **complicated** or anything," was the sardonic riposte.

"Throw in the way that there are at least four different, competing national agendas amongst us foreign volunteers, and you're looking at a fair approximation of 'Byzantine'," the Welsh-born Kiwi noted dryly.

Snoopy paused in shedding his web-gear and gave his friend a close look. "**Four** competing agendas?"

"At least – maybe more, depending on which alphabet-agencies are involved on the American end. The Russkies want cash for guns and men – on the surface, anyway. The Yanks want the mine at Cambria. The Brits... well, it looks like they're trying to drum up some export sales of their latest toys."

"And **our** ulterior motive is...?"

"I'd like ta know that, too," that buzzsaw voice asked. Ira had just appeared at the tent's entrance and now gave Fenris' profile a steady look.

Fenris turned to look Ira right in the eye... and as he turned, the Brooklyn-born _guerrillera_ sucked in a startled breath: for a moment, when the light from the bare bulbs overhead hit him at just the right angle, it flashed off the backs of his eyes, casting eerie green-yellow reflections in their depths - like a cat's eyes... or a wolf's. "Us, Miss Smythe?" he asked, with an impish innocence. "We're here to kill monsters."

"Wh... what th' hell **are** you?" she asked, her own eyes wide.

_Aw, hell - she must've caught a glimpse of the shine-job._ "Very good at what I do," he smiled blandly. "And to answer your question, in the short-term we're here to find out what the hell is causing the problems in the mine and mallet the bloody thing. Longer-term, we'd be more than happy to drop a spanner into the works of the Stormers' operations here – which would seem to mean helping out the CVLA as a whole; as far as that goes, we're not really at odds with any of the others' goals."

"Th-that's good t' know," the slightly pale freedom-fighter nodded, starting to back away the tiniest bit.

"Not that you would seem to be in a position to question allegiances, Miss Smythe," Fenris added blandly, freezing her in her tracks. "You're American by nationality and culture, yet the flag on your sleeve is the twin cobras of Arulco, not the Stars and Stripes. Why are **you** here?"

Still rattled, it took Ira a moment to find her words. "I, uh, I came down here with th' Peace Corps four years ago, lookin' t' help deliver food and medical aid and restart th' education system. Glory seized all th' medicine for her cronies... arrested th' local doctors who met with us... burned all the textbooks... shoved th' food inta warehouses t' rot so she could starve th' people inta obedience... hell, th' first of our guys who got in the troops' face about it got butt-stroked for his trouble - it was friggin' Somalia all over again. Didn't take too long t' figure out that th' only 'help' th' Arulcans needed was getting rid of her – any way they could."

Fenris arched a brow. "Indeed..."

"Don't take it personally, Ira," Snoopy suggested sardonically. "The guy's been fighting the Stormers so long he's a little suspicious of **everybody**."

"Snoopy, trust is only dangerous when you have to rely on it," his friend returned dryly.

"Wise words stolen from a wise man," MacGyver drawled, slipping past Ira into the tent. "Over here, right?"

"Yeah, that's right," Ira nodded. "There's some partitions there that you can rig up so th' three a you ladies can have some privacy."

"Thoughtful," the redhead noted, setting her Bergen at the foot of the cot beyond Fenris'. "We'll see you later this morning, then," she added, turning to nod a farewell at the peacenik-turned-guerrilla... (inadvertantly?) letting the older woman catch that same flash of eerie reflectivity in **her** eyes.

Ira took the cue and beat a quick retreat, looking quite disturbed for some strange reason.

"You guys are cruel," Snoopy snorted. _Interesting that she didn't go into Sunnydale Syndrome about it; most people who see something weird like that usually just shake it off as a trick of the light..._ "And that wasn't too smart, either. What if she spreads the story around?"

"Snoopy, we're here to hunt some kind of monster in the mine. Monster-slayers are supposed to be a little weird themselves, y'know? Besides, it's not something we can really control," Fenris returned sourly. "Ask a cat if it can hide its eye-gleams."

"Which raises another point. I don't think the local dead-heads are gonna have much trouble getting at us under canvas: it's not a 'home', so they don't need an invite, and if we block off the door with crosses or something they can simply slit the canvas and drag somebody out."

"I shouldn't put money on that," came the level observation from one of the Ultraviolets, a German named Helmut Grunther who looked quite at home in _flecktarn_. "I spoke to one of the guards as we came in, and it seems that the entire encampment was placed under a blessing by the local Catholic priest."

"So... we're on holy ground?" Snoopy said, with a slow grin. "Damn – and I was thinking we'd settle that whole 'there can be only one!' thing out here!"

The German snorted, as much of an emotional reaction as anyone had seen out of him. "Most amusing. But yes, _nosferatu_ would have an interesting time of trying to get to us here."

"All right, you can gossip later," Fenris said firmly, slipping into a non-com's persona without effort. "Get sorted out, check your gear and lay it out in case we have company – if the Stormers pay us a visit, we're not going to have any warning before it all hits the fan. Those of you who can, get some rest – something tells me tomorrow's gonna be a _loooong_ day."

- - - - - - - -

**02:23, FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA _(12:23/12-02-99 ZULU)_**  
**MOTOR POOL, CHARLIE COMPANY, FOURTH DRAGOONS 'REGIMENT'**  
**CAMBRIA, KINGDOM OF ARULCO**

Major César Torres yelped out a curse as his wrench slipped, gouging his other hand. Working on a Marder-A's balky turret-traversing gear was hard enough in broad daylight with a complete maintenance crew and a unit that had been properly looked-after; it was almost impossible to do it alone, under floodlights, after two in the morning, when the thing was almost rusted solid.

Setting the wrench aside for a moment, he turned away from the recalcitrant equipment and hauled himself up out through the hatch to sit atop C60's turret, reaching into his pocket for a clean rag to wrap around his hand and staunch the bleeding. With that done, he looked along the two rows of flood-lit Marder-As that belonged to his company, taking in the feverish activity surrounding each one with a silent groan. All fourteen were under the wrench, including C60, the company command-track which he was currently sitting on... and despite everything he could imagine doing, it would take an act of God Himself to get them fighting-fit. Getting a company of mechanised infantry ready to ride its infantry-fighting-vehicles into combat is a demanding task for a man in command of a unit of trained professionals. For a man whose unit was comprised primarily of semi-literate ex-farm-boys who've never worked on anything more complex than a tractor – if even that – it could try the patience of a saint... and César Torres had never been known for his saintly disposition.

The Fourth Dragoons had been ordered to conduct a mounted operation, riding some seventy kilometres from its home base to even reach the field of battle. That alone was a near-insurmountable problem. When he'd taken command of Charlie company three years before, Torres had already been under a cloud of sorts, because he'd come from the Third Rifles, which was home-based in Chitzena... a unit and town historically loyal to the Cordona family (or at least ambivalent about the Chivaldoris and Glory); he hadn't made himself any more friends when, remembering what laxness had cost his fellows under Volunteer fire, he'd immediately launched into a tirade against his predecessor, who had let his maintenance states slide before handing over the reins. The final nail in Torres' coffin had been the fact that said predecessor had already inserted himself into the good graces of one of Glory's cliques from his place as second-in-command of the First Grenadier Guards, making any criticism of him... embarrassing to Colonel Pedroza and all the others who had promoted him. Consequently, Pedroza had cited 'budget cutbacks' and reallocated most of the battalion's budget of cash, supplies and best personnel to Alpha, Bravo and Echo companies... which _just happened_ to be commanded by Pedroza's fair-haired boys, instead of the 'troublemakers' in Charlie and Delta. Charlie, as well as Delta Company (commanded by Augusto Pavón, another northerner), had been left with a fraction of their normal budgets that had barely allowed them to meet the troops' basic needs for food, housing and clothing; for his own part, Torres had scraped together _just_ enough to let his troops retain their basic infantry skills, but without fuel or spare parts or training facilities (also prioritised to more 'loyal' units), he'd been unable to train his men to maintain his IFVs, much less fight from them. None of the Marders had left the battalion laager since he took command three years ago – and with his predecessor's _laissez-faire_ approach to maintenance, they'd been in poor shape even _before_ they'd sat idle so long. What was worse, Pedroza had cited 'current operational postures' and refused him permission to move the Marders into the battalion's semi-permanent storage bay, which meant that all fourteen of those thirty-five-ton hunks of metal had spent three whole years sitting out in the open air in temperatures that often reached the high thirties and humidity that rarely dropped below 80. Calling the inevitable results 'corrosion' was like calling the Pacific 'a big puddle'.

Thankfully, the entirety of Second Brigade's maintenance units were being bent on putting the Dragoons into fighting order, and a strong party of Stormhawk professionals who had been assisting in the re-equipping and re-training of the Fifth Fusiliers had been diverted to help. The senior Stormer had taken one look at the rust-streaked hulks of Charlie and Delta's Marders and almost dropped dead of horror. He'd pronounced those two companies the most crucial concerns – sounding oddly like a doctor triaging patients in an ER, which probably wasn't too far off when you thought about it – and immediately bent all his peoples' efforts on fixing them, despite Pedroza's shrill demands that they look after his precious tanks first.

With that in mind, Torres looked past his feet at the open engine-bay, where three men working a block-and-tackle rig were hoisting out the Marder's big six-cylinder diesel, under the supervision of a disgusted-looking blond man in beige working overalls with three full- and two half-stripes on his sleeve. "Well, Collins? How bad is it?"

"Sir, I have _never_ seen tracks this fucked-up in my whole _life_," Stormhawk Master Sergeant Blake Collins snarled. "Nobody's ever introduced your boss to the concept of 'cost of ownership', have they? I mean, those climate-controlled storage bays exist for a _reason_."

"Colonel Pedroza -"

"- Needs my foot up his ass for thinking like a _prima donna_ instead of a commander. Major, not _one_ of these tracks can even _move_. I haven't had a chance to tear down any of the engines other than _this_ one yet" (he indicated the ravaged powerplant his men were removing from C60) "but even if it's the _worst_ of the lot, you're _still_ in deep shit. All the seals and lines are shot; the diesel dregs in the fuel system perished and totaled the pump and injectors; hell, two of the pistons are rusted right into the sides of the cylinders! Now, with only a _minor_ miracle we _might_ be able to put _some_ of these IFVs back into the game - but I ain't gonna hold my breath. All their treads need complete replacement, half their road-wheels are worn out, a couple of the friggin' cogs are actually _cracked_, and I don't even want to _think_ about how bad the transmissions and brakes are. The troop-doors and hatch-hinges are rusted completely solid - I think a couple of 'em are about rusted _through_ and ready to fall right the hell off! – and even if they weren't, the hydraulics are almost as bad. The turret bearings are frozen solid on a couple of 'em, and every one of the turret drive-motors needs a complete overhaul at the _least_." Collins jerked his chin at the very turret Torres was sitting on, giving grim punctuation to _that_ particular complaint.

When the man paused for breath, Torres couldn't help but prompt him on another key issue, despite a fair idea of how bad the answer would be. "And the weapons?"

"Sir, according to the records each one of those tracks shot out its entire magazines five times over during its last exercise, then - instead of the weapons being dismounted, cleaned, and stored in a climate-controlled weapons bunker like they're _supposed_ to be – that lazy asshole you took over from simply left 'em on the vehicles when he shoved 'em out into the elements to sit there and fucking _rot_. No cleaning; no lubing; just left 'em _cold_. They're all rusted solid on the breech end, and between the left-over powder and the conditions the friggin' _bores_ are corroded too, and I didn't think you could _do_ that to chrome-lined barrels!" Collins waved a hand at C60's driver and gunner. The driver was sitting near the Marder with the turret's now-dismounted South African-made G12 twenty-millimetre cannon between his knees, breaking it down into its component pieces... sometimes even using a _hammer_ to break apart components which were too badly corroded to separate any other way. As he got a part free, he'd drop it into the solvent tank in front of him and start working on the next one. Next to him, the gunner was scrubbing furiously at a corroded component with a wire brush. Every so often, he'd stop, drop the part he was working on back into the solvent, and fish out another one to work on. From the looks of things, it was taking _at best_ five or six repetitions of the dunk-and-scrub routine to get all of the caked rust off of a given piece. They hadn't even started on the coaxial MG3 yet.

_God help us when it comes time to test-fire those things,_ Torres thought sickly. Weapons in that condition were notoriously delicate and/or temperamental, and it would take only one or two breech-explosions (and the resultant casualties) to completely gut what little fighting spirit the company possessed. "I'd imagine we'll have to adjust the cyclic-timing to minimise problems. Any suggestions?"

"I'd have to ask one of the armourers about that, sir; I'm an engine-and-track man, myself. That said, I hear that the G12's design cyclic rate is about seven-twenty, maybe seven-forty r.p.m.; my best guess would be you'd want to step it down to two-forty or less. Anything more than that with _those_ guns, and I don't even want to _think_ about the results. Same with the MG3s: they're designed for a thousand rounds per minute, but in the state they're in, I'd say anything more than three hundred would asking for 'problems'. Like, 'we're going to need another Timmy!' kind'a problems."

'_We're going to need another Timmy'? Must be some kind of _norteamericano _joke._ "And asking about the sights and the fire-control system would be an exercise in poor humour?"

"You can forget the passive night-vision: the climate pretty much _ate_ most of the wiring and electronics. Same goes for the radios, by the way, but we were gonna replace those anyway. Other than that, the basic day-sights actually look okay; they're all optics, and glass don't rust, thank God. A couple got dinged by flying stones before they were stored, but those lenses're easy enough to replace. The bitch of it will be re-zeroing 'em with the guns when we get 'em re-installed." Collins let out a tired breath. "Sir, can I ask a question?"

"Speak freely, Sergeant."

"Is it me, or does Colonel Pedroza have a real bad case of 'knights and squires' syndrome? Y'know, with _him_ as the knight on a white horse, while all of the actual work that makes him look good gets done by us peons, out of sight and mind?"

"I'm afraid he's not the only one in Arulco who thinks like that, Sergeant," Torres said, tired enough to use a little more candour than he'd intended. "A lot of Glory's people think of 'two-way loyalty' as some kind of quaint notion too."

The Stormer grunted, expecting nothing else. "Look, sir, between my guys and your people, we _might_ be able to get two platoons ready by Sunday night, but with Delta being just as bad –"

_Time to earn my princely salary,_ Torres realised. "How many replacement engines does the battalion have in inventory?"

"Twenty, sir."

"Then we'll start with those. We don't have time to recondition thirty engines before we move out, so survey all of the vehicles in Charlie and Delta companies, find the best ten in each, and replace their current powerpacks with the stored ones to get them mobile; cannibalise the other four tracks in each company for what you need to get the rest into fighting trim. I seem to recall our having about a dozen each of 'virgin' G12s and MG3s in the armoury, too – same routine. That _should_ give each company three platoons of three Marders each, plus a command track – we can make do with that if we have to, but I'll try to commandeer some Saracens from the Red Sleeves to fill out each platoon's troop-lift needs." He was referring to the Brigade Military Police detachment, who now wore not their old _Policía Militar_ brassards, but the red-white-red of the national colours. The similarity to the swastika brassards of Hitler's personal SS enforcers was not lost on him... not that he was about to say so within their earshot. "If Colonel Pedroza bitches to you about it, tell them you're acting on my express orders as Battalion Operations officer. Got it?"

_And if the _cabrón_ complains to **me** about it, I should be able to shut him up by citing 'military necessity'. I don't know if telling anyone higher up the food-chain about his petulant antics will do any good, but if he countermands me on this, I'll have to find out. **Maybe** finding out that half of his command was rotted into complete combat ineffectiveness because he was playing favourites will compel someone to replace him with an officer who knows their ass from a hole in the ground!_

_All right, so under 'Queen' Glory it's a long shot, but who knows? Pigs fly, too – if you kick them hard enough!_

"Yes, sir!" Not knowing Torres' thoughts, Collins stepped back a fraction and gave him a crisp salute - one professional to another.

- - - - - - - -

Meanwhile, in the Charlie company headquarters building only a couple of hundred metres away, a wizened, grey-haired night-janitor was taking very careful note of all the frantic activity around the company's laager, and indeed throughout the battalion's compound... but it was the work on the armoured vehicles that was the key.

_**Nobody** works that hard at this hour to fix vehicles they're not planning to use – and soon,_ Manuel Aponte realised, keeping his eyes on his work as much as he could. _Señor Cordona has to hear about this as soon as possible._

- - - - - - - -

**03:46, FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA _(08:46/12-02-99 ZULU)_**  
'**FOREIGN VOLUNTEER' CANTONMENT, TENTH RIFLE 'REGIMENT' BARRACKS**  
**DRASSEN, FREE ARULCO**

Snoopy flinched awake at the touch on his shoulder, reflexively reaching for his rifle –

– And Fenris' hand closed sharply, urging him back to stillness. The Kiwi was crouched next to him, and as Snoopy's eyes adjusted to the dark, he started picking up certain, rather disquieting details of his friend's appearance. The first thing he noticed was, of course, the gleam of his eyes, which was distinguishing mark enough... but the older trooper was loaded for bear. _Full body-armour and battle-order – what the hell?_

_Silence. Stand to_, the _Kehua_ told him in standard NATO hand-signals. _Enemy seen/suspected._

Snoopy nodded. Explanations could wait until _after_ he was ready for what-the-hell-ever was going on. Glancing about the tent as he shrugged into his armour and web-gear, he saw that MacGyver and Fenris were going from trooper to trooper, rousing each one. _They wouldn't be doing this without a good reason,_ he reasoned, buckling on his helmet.

When the whole team was moving, Fenris and MacGyver gathered the squad leaders together at the tent's centre, including Scope, Sidney, Grunty, and the lanky ex-Green Jacket known as Big Ken who commanded the Ultraviolet detachment's small squad of Gurkha volunteers. It was hard to tell who looked more alien: the Ultraviolets and Snoopy, with their faces hidden by their NVGs, or the two Kiwis, whose reflective wolf-eyes didn't _need_ technological assistance. "Report," Scope breathed.

It was MacGyver who answered. "I don't know what it is, but we've got trouble headed this way, fast. I can feel it."

"You got us up because of some _feminine intuition_?" Big Ken demanded incredulously.

Snoopy ignored the question and looked right at his friend. "Spider-sense?"

"Yup."

"Details?"

She shook her head. "Sorry."

He considered it for half a moment, then shrugged, unsnapped his bayonet's securing strap, and fixed it to his StG-77. "Hell, the Slay-dar has always been good enough for me anyway."

A complex sound from the west drew everyone's attention – among the component noises were a hollow _whump_ like a collapsing tunnel, overlaid with crumpling canvas and the shouts of men startled out of a sound sleep by something unpleasant.

"What the hell -?" Big Ken started to ask.

Then the shouts became screams of fear – and were drowned out by a piercing, inhuman cry. **_SHHHRRRRAAAA-OOOOOOOO!_**

"Me? I've got a lot of female friends, and I _trust_ feminine intuition," Snoopy told Big Ken snarkily. "Let's go!"

- - - - - - - -

It wasn't hard to find the trouble: all they had to do was head towards the sounds of fighting and carnage spreading out from the defectors' camp. As it happened, the trio of younger demon-hunters had covered less than fifty metres before they got their first sight of the enemy: a tent some twenty metres in front of them collapsed under the impact of something big and heavy, bringing more shouts from the troops inside... and as the canvas fell, the thing that had brought it down became visible.

"It's the bloody Crustacean Liberation Army!" Fenris marveled.

Whatever it was, it was ugly and it was _big_ – at least eight feet tall at the 'shoulder', if you could call it that. Snoopy got an impression of a lobster-like dorsal carapace and eyestalks, of scythe-like claws for forelimbs, of a bipedal stance on digitigrade legs… and then its eyestalks locked onto them. The _thing_ reared up and back, letting out another of those Godzilla-like shrieks and flailing its tail in some sort of threat-display that made it stand about _twelve_ feet tall for a moment.

"Don't think it's a Jim Henson fan, guys," Snoopy muttered. Without words, he and Fenris had fanned out to either side of MacGyver, opening their spacing and getting better fields of fire.

"Reason enough to kill it," their nominal boss muttered, thumbing her rifle's selector lever. "Everybody loves the Muppets."

Even as three forefingers closed on three rifle triggers, the thing lowered itself back into its 'normal'(?) hunchbacked stanch and coiled its tail.

Some instinct surged through Snoopy's subconscious, and he thundered "**DOWN!**", dropping flat himself. Both Kiwis heeded the warning, lowering to one knee just as twin streams of high-pressure liquid jetted from the creature's forehead and flashed through the space MacGyver's head and torso had just vacated.

_Spit at **me**, will you?_ MacGyver growled darkly, squeezing her trigger. The G36 snarled a triplet of copper-jacketed SS109s at the hulking creature...

... and all three troopers blinked in amazement as the rounds struck the thing's forehead and _glanced off without effect_!

The creature screeched again and surged forward, and big or not, its tip-toed gait was _fast_. Fenris swore and broke left, rising to his feet and flanking the creature as he fired two bursts into its side. He _saw_ the rounds penetrating, and freshets of clearish-green/blue ichor streaming from the holes they left, but they didn't seem to do any serious harm. Snoopy rolled right to avoid a stomping claw-foot and came up on his knees, stabbing at the thing's side with his bayonet; his position and the creature's speed denied him a good angle, and the blade glanced off the carapace.

MacGyver, the target of the thing's rush for whatever reason, took a different approach. Seeing how little her rifle had availed her against that thick hide, she let it fall and reached over her shoulder for the close-combat weapon that had earned her a few raised eyebrows from Volunteers who weren't 'in the know': a Cold Steel 'gim sword' modeled on the _wu shu kien_ of China's history, three feet of 1050 high-carbon steel with an edge most scalpels would envy. Even as the beast's right forelimb came down at her in a scything overhead arc, the ex-Slayer sidestepped the strike and the charge, waited half a heartbeat, then put every gram of weight and power in her sixty-five-kilo frame into a lateral slash that caught the creature at the fold of its backward-bent knee as the limb passed her, shearing through carapace, ligament and muscle to sever the thing's leg as cleanly as Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsabre might have.

Loosing another shriek – this one with a distinct overtone of agony – the creature came crashing down on its side less than a metre behind the Russian-born demon-hunter, that same green-tinted ichor pouring from the stump of its right leg to pool under its body, its remaining limbs flailing in all directions in helpless anguish, threshing at the air and tearing deep divots into the earth.

Snoopy pivoted to level his rifle on the beast again, grinning as he saw that he now had a perfect shot into its belly, presumably thinner-armoured than the rest of its body. _MacGyver shortsword Big Ugly Critter!_ "'Help – I've fallen, and I can't get up!'" he snorted, then emptied his magazine into the thing's guts, raking it from tail-tip to mouth-parts with rapid single shots. Fenris joined him and did much the same, methodically spacing the eight bursts remaining to him every foot or so along the front two-thirds of the creature's body. One or the other of them hit something important, because the debilitated beast let out a falling groan, threshed again, then went very still.

"Damn – forgot to bring the butter sauce," Snoopy quipped as he reloaded.

"Ah, probably too stringy anyway," Fenris shrugged, doing much the same. "You okay, MacGyver?"

"Never touched me," she shrugged, absently flicking the ichor from her sword and sheathing it as she retrieved her rifle. "Okay, what have we gathered for working tips?"

"Dorsal shell's too tough for five-five-six," Fenris told her with crisp, analytical professionalism, reverting to the creature-expert he'd taught himself to be as they moved off again, retaking their original formation. "Lower flanks are softer, and gut-shots best, but we've no idea where the vitals are. Limbs are as vulnerable as you'd expect from an arthropod, especially around the joints. Ideally, we immobilise, _then_ finish off."

"'Battle of Hoth' tactics, right. What was that stuff it spit at us?"

"Given what I know of crustacean anatomy, 'spit' might be the wrong word," he drawled.

It took his companions a moment to follow that thought, and Snoopy grimaced as he took the other man's meaning. "Oh-kay, I guess these things kick your ass _and_ piss on you."

"Lovely image, Snoop," MacGyver muttered.

"Y'know, for a young woman, you're much too _tense_. You need to calm down, learn to take a little _joy_ in your work," he snarked back.

MacGyver gave him a single-digit response and kept moving, keying her radio headset.

- - - - - - - -

"Didn't I see this in a very bad movie, perhaps last year?" Sidney asked absently, taking a picture-perfect standing rifleman's posture behind the Elcan scope of his privately-purchased personal baby, an SA58 Tactical Carbine – a commercially-made, compact version of the semi-auto-only FN-FAL he'd carried up Mount Harriet in the Falklands. He and his companions had come around a corner in the encampment to spy three more of the creatures tearing at the corpses of several very dead ex-FRA regulars, seemingly dismembering the bodies for transport.

"'Very bad'? Sidney, his neighbours at the graveyard must be calling him 'Whirligig Heinlein' these days," Scope snorted, kneeling at his side with her G36 at the ready.

"What's _he_ got to bitch about?" Hulk wondered. MacGyver had dispatched him with the two senior Brits 'to keep them out of trouble' (read: to keep the Ultraviolets' officers alive to make their meeting in the morning). Like Sidney, his weapon of preference was an FN-FAL made by DS Arms for the United States' domestic commercial market, but he'd opted for the Medium Contour version – Sid's was less cumbersome, but the Medium Contour's full-length barrel meant its rounds packed a touch more clout. "_We're_ the ones who're out of pocket for actually _seeing_ that shitburger."

"I'll explain it to you when we've a little more time," Sidney said absently. "For the moment, I'd say we have some very bloody overgrown _ahnts_ to deal with."

"Hey, don't look at me - _you_ were the one who was supposed to pack the Black Flag!" the gigantic 'Nesian countered lightly.

(("All Uniform Victors, all Hammers, this is Hammer One. Be advised, unknown hostiles' dorsal and upper-flank shell is impervious against five-five-six, I say again, bugs' upper shells will bounce assault-rifle rounds,")) came over their headsets, and the trio traded marveling glances at MacGyver's report. (("Aim for the lower bodies and the limbs if you can, belly shots if possible. Anybody packing seven-six-two, try it and report results."))

"I'd say that's our cue, wouldn't you, my South Pacific friend?" Sidney drawled. "Let's try this one on the right, shall we?"

"I'll hit 'em high, you hit 'em low," Hulk nodded.

- - - - - - - -

The actual 'engagement', such as it was, was over in a few minutes. Most of the Arulcan Volunteers who saw the creatures either froze or legged it as fast as they could... not that anyone could blame them, even – indeed, _especially_! – among the Ultraviolets. Fighting fellow men was one thing, but without the sort of preparation that comes from prior experience, few people are mentally or emotionally equipped to seek conclusions with rejected Hollywood creature-concepts that are all but bullet-proof. However, here and there some of the ex-FRA troopers reacted like soldiers instead of human beings and put up resistance; it was scattered, disorganised and often ineffectual, given the creatures' incredibly tough shells, but it bought time for others to get organised. In the end, the creatures withdrew to their arrival point, a tunnel that had been dug up under one of the defector-camp's tents, dragging a number of slaughtered corpses with them – probably for later consumption, was the unspoken consensus. Quite how much that said for their intelligence was an open question: the stiffening resistance _might_ have been a factor in whatever they used for minds, but as resident 'expert', Fenris was of the opinion that they'd called it a night simply because they'd got what they wanted. Either way, they left behind them a wrecked encampment, several of their own carcasses, and a number of battle-shocked and highly bemused humans.

"God, is that thing _real_?" Raven muttered disbelievingly, keeping a fallen... _whatever_-it-was in her carbine sights as a couple of Ultraviolets moved up beside her to make sure. "It looks like something out of a B-horror movie!"

The brunette Ultraviolet at her shoulder snorted, pumping three rounds through the beast's exposed thoracic plate and lowering her G36 again. "Actually, there's something about it that reminds me of Lynx..."

"Ex-boyfriend?" the blonde half-quipped, relaxing a little as the fallen creature didn't even twitch. _Funny to hear a New York accent out of somebody who came in with the Brits..._

"_Unbelievably_ 'ex'," the younger woman growled, her grip tightening on her rifle.

_Sounds like **that** break-up got nasty..._ "By the way – Charlene Higgens," she said wryly, taking one hand off her weapon. "'Raven'."

"'Buzz' Garneau," her new compatriot nodded, shaking the offered hand for a moment. "Your welcome parties always this fun?"

"We put on a special effort just for you." Raven glanced at the fallen creature once more and shuddered. "So, now what?"

"Now, we collapse that tunnel with a charge and try to catch up on some more sleep while the resident egghead carves a couple of these things up to see what makes 'em tick."


End file.
